An Atheist in the Pulpit

I know I said that I wasn't going to blog about atheism and religion, or atheism versus religion, etc.; but I think it's important to sometimes reflect on the difficult soul-searching that goes on inside the "souls" of those who were raised in some type of religious faith.

As I've recounted elsewhere, I've gone through my own "dark night of the soul." I think those of us atheists who were not raised in a traditionally religious home cannot quite appreciate the unique intellectual and emotional journey of those born into a hegemonic religious milieu.

The following article is from Psychology Today:


Public identity and private belief are never more at odds than when a preacher loses his faith.

By: Bruce Grierson

James McAllister, a 56-year-old Lutheran minister in the midwest, was working on his sunday sermon one Thursday afternoon last summer. It wasn't going well. The reverend wasn't suffering from writer's block—in fact, he was crafting quite an elegant parable about "the importance of making our whole lives a prayer." No, the problem was bigger than that. The sermon skated around a private truth that McAllister could no longer deny.

McAllister has learned that you can tell inspirational stories, grounded in social justice and tolerance and peace, without having to bring God into the picture—and this sermon was a masterful case in point. A woman in his congregation had recently dropped everything to care for her cancer-stricken daughter, and that selfless commitment was sacred in its way. "You can see how I cook the books a little bit to make it easier to look in the mirror," he says of his sermons. "But there are times when I get that sort of empty feeling in my stomach, like I'm a fraud."

Months ago, McAllister, who is presented pseudonymously here, took his crisis to the bishop. He'd lost the faith, he explained, and he wanted out.

"Oh you're not quitting," she said, waving her hand dismissively. "You haven't lost your faith."

"Um, yeah I have," McAllister said. "This is for real."

The bishop shook her head. For the church elders, McAllister's revelations simply did not compute.

"They're either in complete denial," he says, "or they're completely comfortable with the idea that they have a pastor who's a fraud, as long as he puts asses in the seats."

McAllister took the issue up with his psychiatrist. "It emerged that she was a devout Christian herself," he says. "To her credit, she tried to be professional." Where she had once begun and ended their sessions with prayer, she stopped when he asked her to. "But I could see she was squirming. You know, she was sitting with a man of the cloth who had lost it. She had problems with that."

To be a clergyman struggling with God in modern times is to reside at the center of a great battle. At a time when the tension between faith and doubt arguably defines the distance between people more than does gender or race or even politics, the Doubting Priest bears witness for the defense and the prosecution. (Mother Teresa's grave spiritual doubt, as revealed last fall in her letters, means one of two things: Either the closest thing to a modern saint was a phony, or her trials actually make her religious life more meaningful, a poignant example of faith not as a certainty but as a required test that leads to a more profound commitment.) The spiritual struggles of ministers and priests and rabbis remind us that, amid encroaching fundamentalism, atheism is also on the rise. The neo-atheist movement is fueled by outspoken academics and intellectuals including Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others who bombard the airwaves and bestseller lists with their calls for deconversion. You can now send your kid to an atheist summer camp or get yourself certifiably "de-baptized." (Britain's national Secular Society offers the service: "Liberate yourself from the original mumbo jumbo that liberated you from the original sin you never had.") There are hundreds of college-campus groups devoted to secular humanism. The Atheist Alliance International reports "so many speaking requests that leaders of national atheist groups can't keep up."

Even amid the neo-atheist din, a clergy member's crisis of faith stands out. The natural order of things is upset when those entrusted with the protection of souls lose the plot. Because the clergy's livelihood and public identity are intimately bound up with their faith, practical considerations can be just as pressing as theological doubt. And the split between private beliefs and public sermons can leave religious leaders feeling deeply inauthentic, a source of psychic stress that most laypeople will never know.

Many soul-searching clergy never leave the church, making the ranks of ordained agnostics and atheists impossible to tally. But the raw numbers aren't much on the minds of clergy actually in the throes of deconversion. Their doubt is as real and immediate as a cloud over the sun. And somewhere in the nest of questions is a simple one: How did this happen?

McAllister had been raised Catholic, then drifted into a 25-year interregnum where he stopped going to church and called himself an atheist. A midlife spiritual restlessness nudged him into chaplaincy training years ago. A second-career minister—for most of his life he was a graphic designer and a fine artist—McAllister approaches the Big Questions more in the manner of a scholar than of a monk. (Even as a Catholic grade-school kid, he recalls, he hungered for real evidence. "Why," he would ask the nuns, "did this stuff all happen so long ago before there were cameras and TVs? Why aren't there prophets and holy people and miracles now?") Frustrated with his denomination but by no means ready to bail out, he picked up Sam Harris's book The End of Faith. He found he "agreed with about 98 percent of it."

He picked up other books in the neo-atheist canon. He read Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, and then the one-two punch of Christopher Hitchens's mega-bestselling God Is Not Great and his earlier Letter to a Christian Nation. He closed the latter book and found himself saying, aloud, "Amen." He had to face his misgivings. "I realized, it isn't just that I'm hurt by the way I was treated at synod, and it isn't just that the senior pastor that I work with was an asshole. It's that I don't believe in this anymore. And that was terrifying."

McAllister is not just scared for himself. "I know that my parishioners look to me for comfort," he says. "They're coming to the end of their life and they want some assurance that it's all going to be OK. I have sat at the deathbed of people in my congregation and told them what I regard as lies—or fantasies, at least—just to give them comfort. I'm willing to do that up to a point, but not for the rest of my working life."

Then there's the practical dimension. McAllister owes the church $18,000 for his schooling, at the same time as he's trying to put his last son through college. "I'm 56, which isn't a real good age to be pounding the pavement, and I've got a master's of divinity, not the most marketable degree in the world."

Richard Dawkins is convinced that McAllister's situation is common; in fact, he hopes one day to address it through "clergyman-retraining scholarships," set up through his charitable foundation, to "bridge the gap between living a lie and getting a new life," as he puts it.

McAllister's dilemma is familiar to Dan Barker, who coheads the Madison, Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). The group spreads the word about atheism and fights legal battles to keep church and state separate. It is a soft place to land for the doubters who find it. Barker daily receives e-mails and letters from people who are wrestling with issues of faith, and he always writes back promptly and cheerily. E-mails from clergy are a very small part of the mix. But of all the stories he hears, these are the ones that resonate most—because they are his story, too.

Barker was a religious prodigy. Raised attending a charismatic Pentecostal church near Disneyland, he received "the call" at age 15, and wasted no time spreading the good news. He converted his high-school Spanish teacher. He became part of an evangelical team that went door-to-door holding revival meetings. He penned and performed popular Christian jingles.

But after a milestone birthday, number 30, came and went in 1979, Barker found himself agitated. Creatively, he was stalled; he was having trouble working on a Christian musical about a lost lamb, "because," he explains, "my views were changing while I was trying to write it." The restlessness, he determined, was spiritual. "It was as if there was a little knock on my skull and somebody was saying, 'Hello! Anybody home?' I was starving and didn't know it, like when you work hard on a project and forget to eat and don't know you are hungry until you are really hungry."

He began reading widely outside the Christian canon: science magazines, psychology, philosophy. It was the liberal-arts education he never had, and what followed was "a slow but steady migration across the theological spectrum" that took about five years. (Among the deeply faithful, doubt is often first stoked with exposure to the "outside world.")

As he carried on a secret life of secular reading, Barker phased out the fire-and-brimstone sermons. "But even then I felt hypocritical, often hearing myself mouth words about which I was no longer sure, but words that the audience wanted to hear."

The confirmation, as Barker interpreted it, came one night in November, as he lay on a burlap cot in a church in a Mexican border town where he'd come to give a guest sermon. As he peered out at a splash of stars, Barker had a sudden profound sensation that had nothing to do with intellect, the kind of deeply felt moment more commonly associated with finding God than losing Him. He was, Barker understood, utterly alone here.

"For my whole life there had been this giant eyeball looking at me, this god, this holy spirit, this church history, and this Bible. And not only everything I did but everything I thought was being judged: Was God pleased? I realized that that wasn't there anymore. It occurred to me, 'I own these thoughts. Nobody knows what I'm thinking right now. There's no fear of hell, no fear of judgment, I don't have to be right or wrong, I can just be me.'" It felt as if charges had been dropped for a crime for which he had been falsely accused. It was exhilarating and frightening all at once. "When you're ready to jump out of an airplane to skydive, you can be terrified but excited at the same time," he says. "There's a point where you go, all right, let's do this."

Says Barker: "we surveyed our members some years ago, asking them: "If you were raised religious, why did you change your mind?" There was no one answer. Some people gave social reasons: the way the church treats women. Some people gave reasons like, 'the fear of hell—I just couldn't live with that.' But the answer people gave more often than any other was that it was intellectual: Religion eventually just did not make sense."

Looking back, Tom Reed, a former Roman Catholic priest from Mississippi, can pretty clearly identify his own moment of truth. It followed a quick succession of historical events: the 1968 Vatican statement upholding opposition to birth control and the death of Martin Luther King Jr. The two events finished off Reed's faith in the church and his faith in God.

For Reed, deconversion was almost as quick and binary as the flick of a switch. At a certain point, he says, "it was suddenly clear that the courageous thing to do was to just admit that this is all made up.

"I remember waking up one day saying, I'm going to practice being an atheist, just move through the day with that in mind. It had become a part of my being, the idea that God was ultimately responsible for everything that was happening. Now I proceeded from the assumption that there was no God in the picture."

It sounds like a coolly rational process, a Jesuitical internal debate tipping forward into certainty. It wasn't. "It was scary as hell," Reed says. "I realized, 'I'm not going to see my mother and father again.' " The sense of cold finality, the impression that one's prayers are just so many tennis balls served into the ocean: Such existential issues are a big part of anybody's crisis of faith. But for religious leaders, the stakes are raised even further, for faith is no longer a private matter.

"As a clergyman your livelihood is not just a job—it's a whole theological system that you'd better be on board with," says Dick Hewetson, a former Episcopal minister from Minnesota who left the church to do secular work and soon called himself an atheist.

"It hit me during those last couple of years in the pulpit that everything coming out of my mouth was being taken as gospel," he says. "I began to think, This is crazy. If I tell these people something, they believe me. Remember Jonestown? People asked, How could that happen? Well, I know how. I wasn't the Jim Jones type, and my people weren't the Jonestown type. But I was the shepherd and they were the sheep, for sure."

Charles Templeton, the late Canadian evangelist-turned-journalist, argued that a disjunction between what clergymen say publicly and what they believe privately is so common that serious cognitive dissonance comes with the territory. "Most intelligent clergymen preach to the right of their theology," Templeton wrote in his memoir Farewell to God. "They are more conservative in the pulpit than they are in private conversation or when counseling a parishioner."

What eventually happens, as it did for James McAllister, is that sermons become cooler and less dogmatic. The clergyman, stated Templeton, "is likely to settle for what might best be described as an altruistic, do-goodest Christian philosophy."

Krista Wren [name changed], who never became a minister only because doors were quietly closed in front of her, tells a tale of spiritual disaffection with an ironic twist. A minister's wife from Atlanta and "a flailing Christian for 23 years," Wren worked with her husband on Pat Robertson's ministry before leaving to do missionary work in Africa. She thought of herself as a missionary; unfortunately for her, no one else did. At one fund-raising meeting prior to the couple's African departure, three dozen people gathered around her husband, Tom [name changed], and one said a prayer: "God, anoint Tom to bring forth your word with power! Let him see miracles as he prays for the people of Africa. May he lead many to Christ as you empower his words... " Then the crowd gathered around her. She held her breath in anticipation. "And Dear God," a woman's voice said, "please give Krista creative ways to do laundry." It was a decisive moment and in a way a portent of the end. "Maybe I've not gotten past it because it sums up the mind of many churches and even so many scriptures," Wren wrote in a recent e-mail to Dan Barker, with whom she had been corresponding. "Men do great things for God—and women wash their shorts."

Wren is currently a hairsbreadth away from throwing it all over the side and coming out as an atheist.

But here is the twist: Her husband became a pastor only because, many years ago, she converted him. ("And with a great deal of effort.") Now she's heading back across the bridge the other way. She is virtually certain he won't make the trip with her. What is certain is that their marriage will be tested. Her disaffection is a subject so delicate she handles it with tongs.

"I'm hesitant to say too much, but the things that I have said have caused him to look as though his dog just died. When he learned I was corresponding with Dan—he looked over my shoulder in the middle of an e-mail—the color drained from his face. He shook his head and said, as he walked out of the room, 'This is just sad.' Well, part of me thinks it's sad, and part of me thinks it's about damn time."

Barker's own marriage did not survive his spiritual U-turn. (His wife, who remains faithful, remarried a Baptist minister.) And their four children?

"We both agreed that the children should never have to be in a position where they had to choose sides." One son has announced that he doesn't believe in God. One daughter "was going to a Unitarian church for a while, and I think she might be a nominal believer." A second daughter "has been a New Agey believer for a while." The third daughter is patently, traditionally religious. Barker seems pleased by the way the kids landed all across the spectrum of belief/disbelief, pixels in a snapshot of free will. Religious conversion is often explained in part as an effort to relieve the tension of uncertainty ("If the decision could be made conscious," psychiatrist M. Scott Peck once wrote, "I think it would be as if that person said to himself or herself, 'I am willing to do anything—anything—in order to liberate myself from this chaos.'") But letting faith go, in the end, can bring relief, too.

"We tend to ignore how much cognitive effort is required to maintain extreme religious beliefs, which have no supporting evidence whatsoever," says the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. He likens the process to a cell trying to maintain its osmotic pressure. "You're trying to pump out the mainstream influences all the time. You're trying to maintain this wall, and keep your beliefs inside, and all these other beliefs outside. That's hard work." In some ways, then, at least for fundamentalists, "growing out of it is the easiest thing in the world."

In Dan Barker's journey from fundamentalism to atheism, there were two stages of disillusionment. First came the loss of faith in the religion (that is, the loss of faith in the literal word), and then came the loss of faith in faith itself.

"The first step is hardest," he says. "Because as a fundamentalist, there is no middle ground.

"I remember a pastor telling me that he had a couple of congregants who didn't believe in the historical truth of Adam and Eve. They thought that Adam and Eve were a metaphor. I was shocked. I thought, 'How can you even let them be in your church? If parts of the Bible can be allegorized, then anything goes!'

"But I made the leap: OK, the fact that I disagree with these Christians should not be grounds for disfellowshipping them. That was a hard thing for me to do. But once I did it, the later flying leaps that I made were easier to take, psychologically, because I'd already admitted some gray."

A number of the clergy who have contacted Barker tell of a similar spiritual arc. It's as if a kind of psychological algorithm begins to work, with the shedding of illusions proceeding in inevitable, sequential steps, until an outdated belief is pitched with last night's coffee grounds. We wake up, if we're lucky: case closed.

And yet it is not so simple as that. Carlton Pearson is an example of a clergyman whose spiritual about-face need not end up where neo-atheists say it should. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Pearson, then a Pentecostal bishop, was among the most prominent and beloved fundamentalist preachers in the American South, heading up a megachurch in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a loyal congregation 5,000 strong.

But something happened to Pearson as he and his church nosed toward the millennium. He stopped believing in hell and sin and the literal interpretation of the scriptures.

He was eating dinner in front of the TV with his baby daughter. On the news, Peter Jennings was revisiting Rwanda, investigating the fallout from that country's civil war. The scene was nightmarish: tiny infants, flies in their eyes and hair red from malnutrition groping at the empty breasts of their skeletal mothers. Carlton looked over at his own plump-faced child, then back at the TV. These African kids would soon be gone. Gone where? According to his own formal belief system, they were bound for hell. Somebody, he thought, needs to preach the gospel to these kids right now. To save them.

And then another thought formed. "You think I'm sucking them into hell? Carlton, look. They're already there." This, he thought, is where the pain comes from, all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. We do it to each other, and to ourselves. "I saw emergency rooms and divorce courts and jails," Pearson recalls. "For the first time in my life, I did not see God as the inventor of hell."

It was a very different Carlton Pearson who returned to the pulpit. A lot of things he had been preaching, he told his congregation, were wrong. The central premise of their faith, the idea, "as my dad used to put it, that 'You gonna be cookin,' but you ain't never gonna get done!' " was bogus. There is no eternal damnation.

Almost all of the flock abandoned Pearson, who was officially declared a heretic by the College of Pentecostal Bishops.

Like Dan Barker, Carlton Pearson made a big leap away from literalism. And that leap set a chain-reaction of new perceptions: He became much less judgmental, more receptive to people and ideas he had dismissed or discounted. Unlike Barker's leap, Pearson's did not land him in a godless place. Throughout his trials the transmission signal of the divine, a felt thing, an inarticulable but absolutely bet-the-farm certainty persisted.

And so instead of abandoning God he invented a new theology that he calls the "gospel of inclusion," and he hung out a new shingle for a church he calls New Dimensions. It's a theology that gives everyone, not just avowed Christians, hope of salvation—and spares everyone the eternal fire of hell.

"I believe the logic of God is inerrant," he says. "I don't believe that the letter is. The logic of God would be love; the letter of God would be law." That Pearson is nominally a Christian seems almost a trivial point. After he was officially declared a heretic by the College of Pentecostal Bishops, the Unitarian Church of Christ opened its arms to him; and since it preached an inclusiveness he appreciated, the denomination seemed as good a place as any to hang his hat.

The Unitarian Church is a haven for many an atheist and agnostic, offering the comforting ritual (hymns are often rewritten with nontheistic lyrics) and esprit de corps of religion, without the dogma. Suzanne Paul, a minister to the New Hope Unitarian Universalist congregation in the suburbs of Detroit, was raised Roman Catholic, but could not stop questioning the "logic" of the Bible, and concluded that she was an atheist at age 20. She became involved in humanistic Judaism through her husband and finally found a niche in New Hope, where she leads holiday celebrations she sorely missed. "We celebrate Passover, Easter, Yom Kippur, asking, 'What can we learn from this holiday?' Yom Kippur, for example, is about forgiveness and atonement. We are naturally social animals and like to be with like-minded people. I enjoy the community aspect of religion but not the theistic end of it."

It took Suzanne some three decades to openly declare herself an atheist. "I recognized early that you can clear a room if you say you're an atheist. I prefer to identify myself as a humanist."

Pearson, too, has struggled with when and how to characterize his beliefs. "I don't always say this publicly but I'm starting to feel more free to do so: I don't necessarily believe in a god, or the God; I just believe in God."

Since his new direction, Pearson's fortunes have plummeted. Only about a hundred people hear him preach on Sundays at 1 p.m. because they have to wait until the Episcopalians finish their service. "We're in a foster-care program," he says.

And when people approach him and say, "Bishop Pearson, I'm losing my faith," he now has a better answer.

"We spend our lives impersonating who we think others want us to be," he says. "And we end up as living impostors. So, when someone comes to me and tells me they're losing their faith, I congratulate them. You're starting to embrace your own thinking self—the essential, immutable, immortal self— as opposed to the accidental criminal you have been made to think you are."

Doubt, for Carlton Pearson, isn't a sign that one's faith is evaporating; it's just a sign that it's going underground and changing.

And so there emerges, in the literature of spiritual self-transformation, a kind of parallel canon between the religious conversions and the Dawkins-style deconversions. It is the idea of the full circle, or the nun-turned-religious scholar Karen Armstrong's so-called "spiral staircase," wherein we eventually come back around to our old spiritual position, but at a higher level, from which we see a wider landscape.

It's the story of the young Carl Jung. Growing up in Geneva, he watched his parson father become tormented by religious doubt. This made him reject conventional religious practice, but it sharpened his sense of the importance of some sort of personal spiritual quest, which he regarded as the main issue in the life of everyone over 35.

The desertion of priests and nuns from the Catholic church since the 1960s seems to be the story of an en masse loss of faith. "But it can also be seen as a strengthening of faith," says John Portmann, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, who is working on a book on "cultural Catholicism." (By far the most-cited reason for leaving was unrelated to God: It was church policy on celibacy and marriage.) "If some semblance of faith can persist in spite of all [the church's missteps and scandals], you know your faith is real, you weren't in it for the trappings of the church or the comfort of the rituals."

Dan Barker has now been an atheist longer than he was a believer, and he is at peace with his decision. But for the more recent deconverts, some struggles remain. Perhaps chief among them is finding a substitute for the very real consolations that faith provided. When you've lost God, how do you fill the void?

"That's what I'm wrestling with now," says James McAllister. "I don't have anyone to talk to in my heart. The prayers I used to say, I simply don't bother anymore. I obviously regard prayer to be silly, even. But it was a comforting place that I could go. I've let that go. And there is a void. And hopefully it can be replaced just by appreciating being alive."


Psychology Today Magazine, Jan/Feb 2008
Last Reviewed 2 Apr 2008
Article ID: 4493

Interlude: Thirty-four Thousand Feet Above Sea Level

The early morning sunlight, the severely angular light, makes of the web of thread-like gossamer rivers below silvery veins, as if the earth were one colossal chunk of ore.

This place is something to return to, secretly and alone, to plunder with one's hands or with one's heart.

Digesting Naturalism

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I haven't been posting here for a while; or only sporadically. I've grown increasingly weary from reading and trying to address the almost daily incursions into public discourse and governmental policy (both national and local) by the Evangelical Religious Right.

Additionally, I've become bored with the Ping-Pong match between the pejoratively-named "New Atheists" and their scores of detractors. I've written about this numerous times before, so I will just briefly reiterate my thoughts on the matter.

Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens have been derided for their disrespectful and caustic tone; for their allegedly incomplete scholarship as regards contemporary theistic arguments; for their alleged advocacy of a fascist-like pogrom to rid the country of anyone professing religious belief of any kind; and for their alleged tarnishing of the good, and more temperate, name of atheism.

But the main goal of these New Atheists, as I read them, is to rid public discourse of the taboo against ridiculing the ridiculous; a subsidiary goal is to rid public discourse of the taboo against atheism as such. Of course, reasonable people will debate whether or not their approach to this secondary goal is the right one or not.

But what I see as the underlying motif in this campaign, as well as the more temperate tomes of thinkers like Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and Duke philosopher Owen Flanagan, is the project of de-deifying nature and, more importantly, re-naturalizing human beings.

I think the project of de-deifying nature has been almost entirely completed thanks to the blossoming of the sciences since the early 19th Century. The project of re-naturalizing human beings has also made great strides ever since the "Decade of the Brain" in the 1990's, and the steadily increasing maturation of the disciplines falling under the umbrella of neuroscience.

But there a few major obstacles to overcome before a naturalistic world-view can become widespread. These may prove insurmountable. Chief among these is the idea that human beings do not have a soul, much less a "self" that is an actual entity that comprises the kernel of personal identity. What I mean by that is what Siddhartha Gautama claimed 2,500 years ago: there is no self.

The other big one is the notion of free will - that human beings possess a power to contravene the law of universal causality. Or, as libertarian William Thomas puts it:

In every moment, many courses of action are open to us; whichever action we take, we could equally well have chosen to do something else. Within the sphere of actions that are open to choice, what we do is up to us and is not just the inescapable outcome of causes outside our control.

But there are good philosophical arguments against this view, as well as an increasing body of scientific evidence in opposition to it. The only legitimate argument in defense of it, in my view, is that from personal experience: we all feel as if we have free will. But as Spinoza noted a long time ago, "Men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and desires, but are ignorant of the causes by which they are led to wish and desire."

A more general and over-arching resistance to the re-naturalization of human beings is the displacement of our perceived importance in the Universe: we are not a loving and omnipotent god's creation; we may not even be alone in the Universe; and we are not even the apogee of the evolutionary process.

So instead of spending my time railing against the incursions of the Evangelical Religious Right and their self-proclaimed "moral majority"; or against scientifically illiterate school boards and Presidential candidates; or trying to secure a place at the table of public discourse for atheism; I will spend my time and energy trying to persuade us human beings of the need for re-naturalizing ourselves. As regarding the former activities, I will speak my mind at the ballot box.

My template for this process of re-naturalization will be what was the central concern of Friedrich Nietzsche. Whatever people think they know of Nietzsche's ideas, they are probably misinformed - and his ideas misrepresented. Granted, Nietzsche is notoriously difficult to understand, and I am indebted to the writings and correspondence of British philosopher Keith Ansell-Pearson for his accessible exegesis of Nietzsche's corpus; but I will continue the attempt to render Nietzsche's prescient ideas in a more modern vernacular. My next post will attempt just that, as concisely and as cogently as I can.







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naturalism, Nietzsche

New Year's Resolution

I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish for myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year - what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in all things. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth!

- Friedrich Nietzsche from The Gay Science (1882)

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New Year's Resolution, naturalism, Nietzsche, The Gay Science

I forgot how beautiful the Earth is...

As someone with a naturalistic view of existence and the world, it surprises me to find how little I spend appreciating the actual world. Sure, you can philosophize until it comes out your ear holes, but what good is all that if you never take the time to see the world? And I don't just mean going outside for a walk or hiking on a local trail. I mean actually seeing more of the world than what's within an easy traveling distance.

Two weeks ago I had to fly out to Los Angeles from where I live in New Jersey. I suppose I was fortunate, because as we climbed to almost 40,000 ft we enjoyed clear skies for almost the entire flight. The first thing that struck me was how immense the Earth is. Sure, you can quote numbers and measures and statistics about the dimensions of the Earth, but until you are put in a place where you can experience its vastness - at least as much as possible - you don't get the same feelings of wonder and awe.

As we left the Northeast - which I've seen from a plane hundreds of times before - we flew over the bread basket of our country, the Great Plains. From that altitude, you can see areas that are sparsely populated, interspersed with the bricolage of tilled and farmed land - a patchwork quilt of muted, earthy colors. From this perspective you could also see the multiplicity of communal arrangements: from hamlet to village to town to city.

But the real interesting geography came into view as we left the Plains States for the Rocky Mountain States. First the long, sloping foothills come into view - a steady, calm overture gradually rising to a crescendo of the forbidding abruptness of a colossal mountain fortress, so massive that one is compelled to think it must conceal and guard the most precious treasure in its labyrinthine keep. My favorite mountain peak has to be the Grand Tetons of Wyoming:



Leaving the seemingly unbroken chain of rocky mountains threading their way up into the far north, we come upon a series of smaller massifs, with the distance between them growing larger and larger. Many of them have stopped short of thrusting above the timberline, and their sparsely forested peaks merge more gingerly into more densely forested foothills.

But soon the irregular fringe of forested expanse gives way to an interlude of the dimpled, the wrinkled, and the jagged, before giving way to the more desolate sweep of the deserts. We see variegated mesas, some small and discreet, others that stretch almost out of sight, leaving the impression of a gigantic, petrified wave frozen in place, eternally on the brink of tipping but never crashing down upon its uninhabited shore. Before long you are startled by the feathered fractals sporadically spread over the sandstone - rivers that have cut channels through the uniform, parched wasteland of earth, which the unflagging wind has brushed and softened.

One last gift before we enter the gates of civilization again is the Barringer meteorite crater in Arizona:



Again, one could be impressed by the measures and dimensions: nearly 4,000 feet wide and over 500 feet deep, it was created by a 150 foot-wide meteorite traveling at an approximate speed of 29,000 m.p.h.! Seeing it from 40,000 feet in the sky was impressive, but I can only imagine how impressive it would have been to stand at its rim; and how doubly impressive it would have been if I had seen it from a plane and stood at its rim...

While all these terrestrial and extraterrestrial phenomena bear the twin aspects of exhilaration and fear, the humanly-created possesses a similar grandeur. As we leave the vast blanket of desert and descend over the last few massifs before the vaster expanse of the open sea, we again encounter sprawling humanity filling every corner and cranny of the spacious valley. But it's not merely the virus-like fecundity of our species that astonishes, but the works of our minds and our hands - the freeways, tunnels, bridges, and skyscrapers. We are the most relentlessly and restlessly creative animal on earth, for good or ill.



But it seems to have fallen to our lot to attempt the increasingly mutually exclusive goals of both flourishing and sustaining life - all life.








Technorati tags:

naturalism, religious naturalism, Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, Barringer Meteorite Crater, Grand Tetons

He once was dead; now He is risen

The greatest recent event - that "God is dead," that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable - is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.

Are we perhaps still too much under the impression of the initial consequences of this event - and these initial consequences . . . are quite the opposite of what one might perhaps expect: They are not at all sad and gloomy but rather like a new and scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn.

At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again . . .

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science


Before I get into my discussion, I want to clarify a few things. First, Nietzsche wrote this in 1882, so this idea that "God is dead" is certainly not new. Second, when Nietzsche says that the Christian god is dead, he means it metaphorically; he means to say that the Christian value system - which up to that point enjoyed an unparalleled hegemony over Europe - was no longer tenable to many. Third - and in case any unread Religious Right party member, or member of the Moral Majority, find their way to this blog - the word "gay" in Nietzsche's lexicon meant "joyous" and not "homosexual." Of course, that shouldn't need to be said...

Despite what many people think of Nietzsche - that is, that he was a life-denying nihilist - he in fact argued for a heretofore unimagined affirmation of life, this life, and not some after-worldly life. I think this misunderstanding comes from not reading Nietzsche's works, and simply relying on what "they" say about him and his philosophy.

He viewed Christian morality as life-denying or life-negating (incidentally, he viewed Buddhism the same way). He believed Christianity taught hatred for the body, for the earth, for anything that was not directed toward the other-worldly paradise of Heaven. In this sense was Nietzsche an "immoralist." But perhaps here a word should be said about the difference between morality and religious culture.

Alonzo Fyfe of the Atheist Ethicist wrote an insightful post about this difference:

The view that I will present will divide religious prescriptions into two classes. One class is properly and correctly linked to ‘morality’. This is a class that transcends different religions and even non-religious belief. This is the class of prescriptions that can legitimately be forced upon others. The second class consists of those prescriptions that belong only to a particular religion. I am going to call this class ‘religious culture’. These are prescriptions that cannot be legitimately forced upon others.

Fyfe goes on to give some examples:

We can easily classify the prescriptions against murder, rape, child abuse, slavery, assault, theft, lying, ‘bearing false witness’, breaking promises or contracts, recklessness, negligence, and similar kinds of actions as prescriptions that the agent will have to take with him as he goes into society.

We can just as easily identify a set of prescriptions that an agent can leave behind – where the fact that one religion may require these types of actions while another does not is of little social consequence. These prescriptions include what to eat or drink, when to eat or drink, where to live (the concept of ‘homeland’), when to pray, how to pray, to whom one is to pray, which scripture to read, when to work (or not work), what to wear. These are the prescriptions that I will put in the category of ‘religious culture’. These are prescriptions that the members of a religion may not impose on others.

Bearing in mind the difference between morality and religious culture, we can return to Nietzsche for a moment. Nietzsche is notoriously difficult to understand and interpret, mainly because he didn't write as a systematic philosopher, and his writing style was more stylistic than stodgy and academic.

Although it's not possible to distill Nietzsche's thought into a single aphorism, perhaps the best we can do for our present purpose is University of Warwick philosophy professor Keith Ansell Pearson's description:

There is no longer any ‘true world’ to be faithful to and to aspire to, that is, no realm of pure being that would give us permanence, bliss, peace, unity, harmony, etc. Rather we are to affirm terrestrial life – becoming, change, multiplicity, plurality – as our only life and in all its complexity and difficulty.

Nietzsche thinks that through naturalism – what he calls the task of translating the human being back into nature – we will, in fact, enrich and potentially expand our conceptions of the possibilities of human existence. To do this he thinks we must be brave, honest, and patient: the free spirit must learn, he says, the value of keeping its energy and enthusiasm in bounds.

But it's not my aim in this post to dissect and present Nietzsche's philosophy. My goal in this post is to talk about how the Christian god (or equally the Muslim or Jewish god) has been "dying" for the past century or so, only to begin to be restored to good health in the past quarter of this century - at least in America.

The most consistent resuscitation attempts have been to sneak creationism/Intelligent Design into our public school systems; federal funding for faith-based programs; and the idea, even among Democrats, that only a "person of faith" - by which they mean a person of Christian or Jewish faith - can lead this country. But perhaps the most ambitious and, arguably, the most ominous attempt is the resolution that passed in the House of Representatives: "Recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith."

I say "ominous" because, as cited in the resolution itself, there are 225,000,000 Christians in this country. That's a lot of Christians, given the fact that our current population is approximately 300,000,000. I'm not sure who they include in their number, but let's assume that 75% of the 300 million are both Christian and members of our electorate. Recent polls have suggested that 90% of Americans are Christian, so I imagine 75% is conservative. I could certainly be wrong.

But if 90% of the population is Christian, and 75% are entitled to vote, and since politicians for national office must necessarily pander to constituencies in order to even get elected, what would happen if this were to become the basis for a Constitutional amendment? Everyone knows there are many people who would love to see a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (a prescription of "religious culture", as the Atheist Ethicist would note).

I mean, who doesn't love Christmas? I'm an atheist, and I love Christmastime. But I enjoy a secular Christmas. I enjoy the gathering of friends and family, the good food and drink, the snow - even the holiday songs (with a few exceptions). Only a true Scrooge could be against it. At least that's what would most likely prevail as "public opinion."

But our government's religious neutrality is exactly what has kept the peace within our country and what has allowed us to flourish. I imagine Christians are confident and emboldened when they hear that 90% of the country is Christian, and that the House of Representatives resolves to express "continued support for Christians in the United States and worldwide." These words, "continued support," are disquietingly vague. Just as Congress has abused the somewhat ambiguous "General Welfare" clause of the U.S. Constitution, a Christian Congress would almost certainly abuse a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution making Christianity the State religion, should it become law. Then the 1st Amendment would certainly be tragically superseded by the "Christian Nation" clause.

Perhaps we need to add this development to Naomi Wolf's article "Fascist America, in 10 easy steps," from her forthcoming book The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot.









Technorati tags:

Nietzsche, Keith Ansell Pearson, House Resolution, Christmas, Christian faith, God is dead, importance of Christmas, importance of the Christian Faith

Mitt Romney

I'm just going to let Mitt Romney's hypocrisy speak for itself. All quotes below are from his speech. Italics mine.

"Today, I wish to address a topic which I believe is fundamental to
America's greatness: our religious liberty."

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be
rejected because of his faith."

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"If I am fortunate to become your president, I will serve no one
religion, no one group, no one cause, and no one interest. "

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were
reserved only for faiths with which we agree. "

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"It was in Philadelphia that our founding fathers defined a
revolutionary vision of liberty, grounded on self evident truths about
the equality of all..."

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"Foremost do we protect religious liberty, not as a matter of policy but
as a matter of right. There will be no established church, and we are
guaranteed the free exercise of our religion."

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "

"...we do not insist on a single strain of religion — rather, we welcome
our nation's symphony of faith. "

"It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America
— the religion of secularism. "








Technorati tags:

Mitt Romney, religious freedom