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Before I get too far absorbed in the various and sundry philosophical positions involved in this defense, let me be qualitatively honest and say that I was raised a staunch Roman Catholic of the Vatican II stripe. For anyone familiar with that particular genus of mind-f*king, that would be enough of a caveat con emptor. But for those who may not know, let me briefly elaborate on the highlights.
Roman Catholicism as practiced by my family was strongly influenced by the machinations of the Ukrainian Catholic Church which continues to observe the tradition of leaving priestly things to ordained priests. The priest conducts much of the mass with his back turned to the laiety and conducts most of the mass in Ukrainian. Hymns, of course, are either conducted in Ukrainian or the local dialect of the area of the parish. The net effect of these influences tends to support a worldview that embraces much of religion and spirituality as “mysterious” and “sacred,” and all of humanity, forgiven and otherwise, completely incapable of passing judgment on church matters, church canon or church doctrine. In other words, Catholicism, in general, was highly supportive of authoritarian world views that deprecated the value of humanity in the grandest of grand schemes. Combine my acquired Catholic traditions with the sociological stresses associated with being an unwelcome immigrant in an immigrant society and the many stresses of raising nine children during the Great Depression, and you have my family – a psychological theme park. Parents, aunts and uncles were either ringmasters, lion tamers or actors with acts that no one would, or could, follow. Alcoholism, addiction, “hospitalizations,” violence and abuse were never very far from the front of my nose. Growing up scared would have been a step up in my estimation; I was positively terrified by what my life was preparing me to expect.
When a person such as me is raised in a family environment that includes the effects of multiple generations of thinking, feeling, intelligent human beings subjected to centralized control of perspective and perception, s/he would tend to distrust any and all forms of thought and value that involve centralized authority or control, sometimes to an absurd degree. This particular psychological “tick” was not broken until university-level calculus over a ten week academic quarter made nurturing my inherent distrust of centralized authority and control totally impractical. Apparently I liked getting patted on my head for being regarded as “smart” by my fellows more than I required sustaining any sense of personal integrity. My compensation, if one could call it that, for having to surrender my sense of integrity to the “social good” was my immediate immersion into a world of alcohol, drugs and hallucinogenic mushrooms, followed within a decade by an avalanche of unprocessed emotions and psychological baggage. This is not to suggest that the hazy days of drug use and abuse were “lost” years, but it is to suggest that I came to recognize that deciding not to decide is, in fact, making a decision that has its own peculiar set of consequences. In my case, my maturity was postponed, severely, and much of the content of my teens and twenties had to revisited and relived, in some sense, so that I could move forward with my life.
So, in addition to my distrust of centralized authority and control, I have since adapted a healthy distrust of just about any solution or resolution that doesn’t meet with at least a cursory personal review and my right to veto any further investment in the solution or resolution going forward. I think that makes me an anarchist, a Libertarian, or a Democrat, but I’m not fully committing to anything without thinking it through with a modicum of intellectual rigor.
I say all of this not to solicit contempt or pity, but only as an attempt to appear at least half as sincere as every atheist or agnostic I have ever met and spent more than a few moments chatting with or getting to know.
I also have studied A Course in Miracles fairly rigorously over a period of years, from which I am currently on a sabbatical of indeterminate length. I mention this because I find the fact that the Course was penned by a committed atheist to be an endless source of both amusement and a delightfully delicious irony. If one believes in the story provided by Dr. Helen Schucman regarding how the Course came to her, then one finds some agreement between my perception of agnostics and atheists and which subset of humans could be trusted to provide a deeply spiritual and moving message to the rest of humanity.
A woman and an atheist! Hahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!
God chose a female atheist to reveal the great spiritual truths of all time?! Was it the hats? Was it the shoes? What was the criteria the Almighty One used in choosing whom to reveal the Course through?
For me, as a general matter, the prevalence of personal sincerity and integrity among the community of atheists and agnostics has been superior to anything I’ve yet seen or experienced among my more religions friends and associates. But that’s just my experience; your’s may be different. What is relevant about my perspective to this discussion is that I am going to do my level best to take the atheist and agnostic arguments on as coming from coequal members of society at large. I am not purposely going to patronize or pander to any constituency here. We’re all nuts, as I will make plain, and the only adult perspective that makes any sense, going forward, is for the adults to retain and remain in charge of important matters of a theological and/or philosophical nature.
Having shared all of the aforementioned, let me first dispense with atheism and the atheistic arguments as quickly as I can. I do this because they are all at least as childish as their religionist analogs.
One can not philosophically deny the existence or reality of anything by first acknowledging, if implicitly, that it exists in the first place. And what better way to prove the existence of a supreme being than to posit the necessity to argue, however passionately, for its nonexistence! Being an atheist in philosophical terms, as opposed to purely sentimental terms, results in an untenable position. The argument for atheism is dead-on-arrival. QED.
The sentiments expressed by most atheists, however, should not be so swiftly swept under the rug: the sentiments of most atheists, I believe, are an accurate assessment of just how fundamentally handicapped human beings are by their own perceptual apparatus. Religions have played a huge role in fomenting unhappiness and misery throughout recorded human history, a fact that should play a more significant role in our thinking about religion and religiosity than it presently does. Adding the piety and certitude of religious persons with the flaws of human perception and human reasoning and you have pulled the pin on a proverbial hand grenade and handed it to a chimpanzee.
But whereas atheists believe that the solution, or resolution, to this problem of human misery and suffering can be ameliorated by simply throwing God and religion away, I would argue that science, itself, would simply become the new misery-maker. Science is every bit a dogmatic meat-grinder as is religion. In fact, there is much that science can learn from an accurate assessment of religious ideological evolution and its analogs as they have happened, and will ultimately happen, I believe, in science and scientific study in the future.
The agnostic, or simply the “don’t know,” position around the existence/reality of a supreme being is, by far, the most solid and honest position one can maintain in matters of theism versus atheism. This position can be a trap, too, as it can be a bar to all evidence to the contrary of one’s positions. The question inevitably becomes, “do I not believe in God because I do not know if s/he exists, or do I not know if God exists because I do not want/wish to believe in the existence of a supreme being?” In other words, I do not know if God exists, but am I at least open to the possibility of such a thing? If I am not open to the possibility, then it is clear that I have lapsed into atheism and the untenable atheistic argument. Once again, if one’s criterion for belief is scientifically derived proofs, a wide array of philosophical arguments all coalesce around the point that God’s existence/reality can no more be scientifically proven than it can be scientifically disproven.
So let us all take a deep breath and allow ourselves to accept the gift, albeit an authoritative one, of being able to stand on the shoulders of the giants who have preceded us in time. All science and all religion are deeply rooted in this tradition of evolution and philosophy of ideological maintenance. Atheism and theism are two sides of the same theistic coin, so one could adopt one of those apparently disparate positions and still reasonably derive the other. Novelty in these matters is clearly a matter of theism versus agnosticism.
Of course, the belligerence towards religion typically found among atheists would have no place among agnostics because of the nature of their argument. Labeling one’s self an agnostic while adopting the tactics of atheists is simply cloaking one’s position for purposes of forensic stealth. Let us be more truthful and honest in our search through these issues.
To proclaim, for all time, ignorance in matters of theism versus atheism suggests that there is no limit that can be reached where further denial of either position becomes a matter of belligerent indifference. Openness to the possibility of the existence of a supreme being suggests that at least some effort is made on a fairly regular basis to personally test one’s professed ignorance in matters of theism against new information or ways of knowing information to be true or false.
In other words, in matters of agnosticism, one can not possibly suggest that this matter will be, at least personally, forever an unknown. And as the reader continues to process the information presented here, the resolution to the whole matter of atheism, theism and agnosticism becomes one where one must decide which “god” one chooses to believe in: the god of belligerent denial, the god of everlasting ignorance, or the god of eternal truth. Ye shall have a god because that much has been commanded by whatever force created the universe as it has revealed itself to humanity.
Clearly the “easier, softer way” in these matters, the path that resolves much of the debate and the dissonance, is the belief in a god of timeless, eternal truth. Belligerent denial, as entertaining as its aficionados might be, is still meaninglessly recalcitrant, and everlasting ignorance has never been a condition that human beings have tolerated for any extended period of time – certainly not for an eternity.
Is the reader beginning to comprehend the nature of the genesis of religion in any of this reasoning? Does the importance or the moment of revelation begin to dawn on the mind of the seeker of things sought? Do we have a moment of certitude striking our core being?
The god of eternal truth. Is it a God, or is it a panoply of truths? Do we live in a universe or a multiverse? Is omnipotence in all matters possible or imaginable? Is omnipresence possible or imaginable in a multiverse? Is omniscience a party in any of these two possibilities? What criteria for perfection can we reasonably expect from any sort of god of eternal truth? Answering, or at least specifying the criteria for answering, these questions will determine our understanding of eternal truth. This might be an important understanding to have onboard since that which is not a party to eternal truth will have a surprisingly limited shelf life. Just ask a few of my now-dead relatives.
And here we are, once again: if something does not last eternally, it can not be an always and forever sort of truth – something easily discernable as imperfect. Our humanity, thus derived, falls into a reasonable, if discouraging, place in the grand scheme of eternal truth. So discouraging is this line of reasoning that, at least at times, any so-called theistic person who does not find themselves questioning the existence of god is either belligerently dishonest or a pathological liar. No matter how “connected” one thinks or believes they are to that which is eternally true, what is certain is that there are significant aspects of the reality we as humans value that are not, and can not, be part of any eternal truth. So if the reader wants to consider themselves as belonging to a particular religious faith that would attempt to hide such a dark, discouraging matter of philosophical fact, they are certainly welcome to. Such is the nature of the belligerent denial the religious accuse and project onto atheists and agnostics. But what any of us should expect, if not demand, is our absolute right to s*t-can the back-handed empowerment of reasons to die, reasons to fear disillusionment, or reasons to choose to live a meaningless existence. Clearly, any religion that espouses that its path to “enlightenment” or “salvation” or “coming home” is the only way or method possible for humanity’s betterment is engaging in sophistry of an exceedingly cynical variety. There is no “one way” to feel discouraged, depressed or anhedonic – authoritarian governments of every stripe have been manufacturing these paths at a reliable rate for most, if not all, of recorded history. Religions, particularly once they become organized, proceed to substitute an illusion of meaning where none can, very reliably or easily, exist.
What to do, what to do.
First, look outside for a brief moment to make sure that the sky is not now falling or that your world is not now any closer to shattering into billions of bits of broken glass.
G’head, get up and look, you lazy schmuck.
I didn’t see anything any differently, either. And yet, how profoundly has our worldview just been altered. No verifiable meaning to human life, or life at all? No loving, personal God that we can pull out of a mental cubbyhole, like Punxsutawney Phil, to see if there will be six more weeks of employment?
Nope. And as my dying aunt revealed ever so indelicately to the family in her last rage one week before she died of cervical cancer, “when you die, you’re dead!” Boo! I think I was all of seven at the time. I would have been scared of that statement except that I was already terrified most of the time by that age, anyway.
So why bother with any of these concerns about life, death, civility, society or what any soothsayer has to say on matters of mortality?
Because of something every one of runs into when our lives run out of “runway” -- we either crash into a fireball at runway’s end and commit suicide, or, we instinctively pull back on the “stick” and leap into the air we used to look up into and through. We have to fly, if only for a while, so that we might have some place to go when velocity and the reality of stopping distance forces us to make a choice. Over and over and over again, if we’re fortunate.
The view from a higher place shows the lives of the many people who populate our world, if only in relief. We see much more than we ever could at eye-level, and, quite honestly, the experience is exhilarating. If you like flying. If you don’t, suicide generally has the greater appeal. The sudden realization that our reality and how we have believed it to be structured was of no more import to eternal truth than which leg we put into our underwear, first, in the morning, can be profoundly shattering for some people. It was for my mother, although her chosen method of suicide, time and again, was to smoke cigarettes until they ate her brain away and she died, gasping for every last breath she could. My sister said Mom said she loved me with her gurgling breath over the phone, but one can never be certain at times like those. One has to have faith and belief. One has to project themselves onto others and check, check and recheck one’s own assumptions about their world and the people in it.
To the extent that your belief in an eternal truth makes times like the death of a parent, a spouse, or even a child seem sensible and, shocking though it may seem, a necessary part of your humanity, then you have a working, functional set of beliefs. When these beliefs carry you through these “out of runway conditions” that will come up from time to time, in a life well-lived, without causing you to lapse into suicidal, para-suicidal, homicidal or extended periods of dysfunctional behavior, then it can be said that you have a faith that works for you.
Beyond faith, there is no certainty in anything, perhaps by design, perhaps by the cruelty of a cosmic despot. What there is, for certain, are choices to live or expire, to share or be selfish, to be reasonable or become irrational. Quite novel at the present moment, we have an additional choice as to whether we will survive as a species or resign ourselves to dust and reconstitution as fodder for some far more successful species -- perhaps the cockroach or perhaps an arachnid.
We can choose to respect and love one another to the best of our individual ability, or we can continue to allow ourselves to become consumed by irrationality so insane that its attraction impacts us like a scorpion’s own sting numbs its injuries when it finds itself wounded by a desert bonfire.
In any case, we are running out of runway and we need to pull back on the stick or resign ourselves to certain expiration. We can be the change and learn to regard one another as openly and as freely as the creation that placed us here in the first place. Or we can continue to terrify and threaten each other, forever finding ludicrous and irrelevant differences between life forms consigned to live their whole lives on a planet not easily nor readily found within a distance traversable using the technology we presently utilize to murder one another.
We must all win, or we will all lose.
