Spiritual Atheism, could there be a greater oxymoron? And yet it is an idea I take quite seriously
and would like to see propagated; indeed, if I ran the zoo, I would like to see
a world where more and more people would choose spiritual atheism over
orthodoxy. So it would seem best to
attempt to define the term.
Spiritual Atheism is the ability to appreciate the wisdom
and teachings of the great religions and spiritual teachings without accepting
as factual the primal myth upon which these religions and teachings are
based. It is the ability to take your
religion with a grain of salt. The
spiritual atheist has great respect for the teachings of Jesus, or the Buddha,
or of Judaism, or Islam, or at least for a great many of these teachings and
the underlying philosophies behind each of them but does not accept the primal
myth, to wit, the existence of a controlling or all powerful God (or “Source”
for those who reject the word God but cling to the essential idea). To the spiritual atheist, we have no loving, benevolent
creator watching over us; there is no one to hear our prayers. We are on our own. There are no angels and there is no
afterlife. What you have is what you get—some
mortal number of years, be it less than one or more than one hundred, in which
you get to live, feel the sun, experience joy and sorrow, with luck find love
and friendship, and then fade into oblivion.
You have no soul that will last beyond the physical existence of your
body. You are this year’s lilies of the
field, and when you are gone, well, next year’s lilies of the field will be
doing all of those things. And in time,
Earth itself and our civilization and all we have accomplished, unless we find
a way to flee to the stars and find new homes, will also face that ultimate
oblivion when our sun expands into a red giant in five or six billion years and
obliterates our planet. And that is if we even make it that long
without destroying ourselves first.
All right, so the atheism part seems clear enough, though of
course much more can and should be said.
But the essential is there: No God, no soul, no protectors, and in a
tragic sense, no comfort. I write these
lines only a little over a month or so since the slaughter of 20 six year old
children and six teachers in Connecticut.
And although adults die constantly in many ways that border on insane,
the deaths of these children, or of the children in the daycare center in
Oklahoma City that an Timothy McVeigh blew up, are the sort of tragedy that
ironically make believers seek what comfort their religion can provide and
simultaneously make doubters like myself reject the idea of a God. Nor are these lines clearly drawn: religious parents might simultaneously be filled with rage, or profoundly
disturbed in some other manner, that God would let this happen to their child
and their child’s classmates, or to their school or their community and at the
same time experience moments of doubt about that God and their religion and at
the same time be comforted by its teachings.
The children are in a better place; their souls are still with you; you
and they will be reunited in the world to come, and all will be well—eternally. And what comfort can the spiritual atheist
offer at such a time? An op-ed article
in the NY Times suggested that the comfort is that the children are at peace;
that we are the ones who, because we are living, feel the pain and mourning and
loss; the victims are beyond all of that.
I guess it was the best the writer, speaking for atheists in general,
could come up with and it didn’t seem like a lot. But frankly, what comfort is there? Does the myth really satisfy the hole left
behind by the tragic loss of any human being for those who loved him or her? I don’t know the answer; I expect to some
degree it works and to another degree the mourner feels the sham: your beloved
has been taken away and will not be back and no words, no teachings, no idea
can fill that hole.
Perhaps my notions of God are infantile. Perhaps the notion of a God who intervenes to
protect us because he or she loves us, who has the power to do so, is
juvenile. But I hear people speak in
such terms on a constant basis: they pray and believe their prayers are heard
and answered; they speak of how they survived an accident because an angel
protected them (but cannot account for the thousands of fatal accidents that
happen daily the wide world over where no angel intervened). All right, so many people believe such
things: that doesn’t mean the ideas are not juvenile, that these people’s
concept of God is rather shallow compared to a theologian or philosopher's. Maybe religion works on multiple levels—beginners
get God the babysitter and more advanced intellects get God who cares for the
universe as a whole, who loves and maintains the beautiful, grand picture, and
who perhaps hears our prayers, but who cannot be expected to actively change
the course of events (at least not most of the time) to prevent tragedy.
I actively reject the first notion, the baby sitter. I don’t think there is such a power or being;
I don’t think anything knows or cares about our fate. If there were a God who had the power to have
saved those children, or saved the World Trade Centers, or prevented the
Holocaust, and this God did not do so, then that is no God I would have any
interest in worshipping. I’d prefer to
put him on trial for crimes against humanity.
And if God does not have that power—if you’ve concocted some religious
system where you worship an all powerful God who created the universe and loves and cares for each of us, but who cannot or will not lift a finger to save us—well,
what does such a God really add to our condition? We are still on our own—might as well be a
spiritual atheist!
And speaking of worship, what kind of Supreme Being would
want to be worshipped anyway? particularly by a race of beings of a lower order
than itself? I can see some value in the
worship of our peers, but I would not have a sidewalk full of a thousand ants
all chanting in ant-speech “Oh, wonderful, wonderful, marvelous human! Oh, incomprehensible creature beyond our
knowing, we adore thee; thine is the glory.”
No, I don’t see why God would have any interest in our sitting around
praising him, unless for the secondary, civilizing effects it has on our
nature.
The only comforts I could try to add to the “the dead are
finally at peace” approach are twofold.
One, statistics: despite the tragedy, most children will go to school and return from school every day
for the rest of their years of schooling and will become adults who will mostly live out their lives without such
tragedy. This is not comfort for the
grieving parents (though it could be some comfort) but it is true.
Our nation is not about to undergo a rash of similar attacks, and
even if it did, the statistics would still hold true: probably not you or your
child or your community. And if such
events did or do continue, religion or no religion, the problem is ours to
grapple with and solve as best we can.
The second comfort may also reflect my own immaturity, or inability to
understand the love of parents for children or spouses for mates, but it could
also reflect a certain degree of enlightenment—and
oddly enough that is a central tenet of spiritual atheism for me, I do respect
the idea of enlightenment (provided you don’t carry it all the way to cosmic
consciousness and so on). And that
enlightened (or juvenile) comfort is this: life, the experience of life, is not
quantifiable. You can’t say, Oh, he
lived eighty years so he had a better richer life than that guy who died at age
50. Or at age six for that matter! The six year old who dies tragically had six
years of what I hope felt like being adored, treasured, entertained, cared for,
plus that child got to taste food, perhaps swim in a pool or lake or ocean, see
sunsets, dream dreams, play with toys, watch favorite programs or movies, play
with friends, love their brothers or sisters, and so on. Who can say that six years of such a blissful
life is in any measure “less” than a longer life, or even that same life
prolonged? To have existed! To have been here! That seems the essential matter. Well, this essay, if that is what it is, was
meant to be introductory. So it grows
time to bring it to a conclusion. I
would end with this, and it is not about comfort.
I do believe in some form of enlightenment, of greater
wisdom. And for me the first
prerequisite of such wisdom is the acceptance of death. This is a hard position to take, for it
disputes the wisdom of many, many wise and learned and often good men who chose
or choose to believe otherwise. I can
only say that such men are wise, but not as wise (being deceived so to speak)
as they would be if they accepted the idea of death. And I’m willing to grant that maybe they know
something I don’t—I can only call them as I see them; I can only present here
the spiritual atheist’s vision of the universe.
If you don’t care for it, you need not read it—find your comfort where
you may; we’re all just trying to get through this world the best we can. But to return to my point, spiritual wisdom,
all wisdom is corrupted when it attempts to defeat or deny the concept of
death. Just as judges must avoid even
the appearance of corruption, how can anyone who denies the reality of absolute
death avoid being guilty of accepting an intellectual bribe? Hey, I
don’t have to die! I can exist as a soul
forever! All my lost loved ones will be reunited with me! Or I will be reincarnated; I have lived before
and I will live again! Everything was
not for nothing! How can any person faced with the obliteration of the self
be faulted for giving way to a delusion that promises such priceless
rewards? Now, make that person have been
brainwashed (in a sense) by his or her early upbringing to be very susceptible
to such ideas; indeed, have been taught that to even question them is evil and
immoral and could even cost you the prize itself! THIS IS WHY TO ME THE HIGHEST FORM OF
SPIRITUAL WISDOM IS THE ACCEPTANCE OF DEATH.
Death is our admission ticket to
this world; the price we pay to enter the carnival. Imagine if you will a pre-life: you are a
spirit in heaven and an angel says to you, “I can give you a life on earth,
with all the riches and treasures it can bring, but in exchange you must be
willing to die when the time comes—not to die to return here to the spiritual
realm, but to truly die.” Now, just unimagined the pre-life part!
In the end, it comes down to TRUTH: would you prefer to live
a life where you feel that someone is watching over you, protecting you, caring
about you, and will continue to do so even after you die, but to believe all of
that even if it is not true? Or would
you rather face the joys and trials and ups and downs of life as a conscious
human being with nothing except the odds to protect you from the worst the
world has to offer, but with a sense that you live your life in harmony with
the truth?
