Posts
A
question that I should think would interest both theists and atheists—although
I doubt that it interests either very much—is whether God is immanent or
transcendent. You’re probably wondering how such a question could
possibly be relevant to an atheist, so please indulge me as I describe three
very different ways of thinking about God.1) Jews, Christians, and Moslems see God as transcendent, by which they mean that “he” is a discrete spiritual being that exists independently of the physical universe. God is not us, and we are not God. God is the greater; we are the lesser; and that’s the way it will always be, on earth as it is in heaven.
2) Some immanent religions regard our lives and the universe itself as like so many dreams in the mind of God, dreams from which we (God) will someday awaken and recollect our true identity. This would be a beautiful way to look at things, if it were true, although I would wonder why God needed sleep, much less REM sleep, and why God would allow itself to have the kind of nightmarish dreams that many earthly lives represent—those of a cannibalistic pedophile and his victims, for example.
3) Other immanent religions believe that God and the universe are one and the same, suggesting that there was no purposeful creation, and that our relationship to God is like that of a drop of water to the ocean.
The
third option is consistent with atheism because it doesn’t require a belief in
the supernatural and because atheists would agree that our identity as separate
persons is but a brief pause in the eternal movement of all-pervasive energy,
an infinitesimal part of which constitutes our beings for an infinitesimal
amount of time. Twenty years ago, I joined two lodges (the IOOF and the
Freemasons) simply by changing my religion label from atheist to pantheist. I
tried to find some intrinsic reward in doing this, but my conclusion was that
for millions of people to take a word—God in this instance—and define it
in hundreds, if not thousands, of ways, makes the word meaningless.
So it is that I consider the pantheistic use of
the word God to be meaningless, and, in actuality, any expression of
belief in God is meaningless in the absence of further explanation. Believing
in the existence of God isn’t like believing in the existence of dogs, the
latter being a belief that has agreed upon meanings which are more or less expansive but
don’t contradict one another. As for the former, Obama, Gandhi,
bin Laden, Schweitzer, Spinoza, Pat Robertson, and the Spanish Grand
Inquisitor, all believed in God, but the God of each made the Gods of the rest
impossible.
Next
to the words for God, the word spiritual is probably the most
used word among religious people. Ironically, if spirituality is defined as a
state of intense and ongoing reflection on what it means to be alive, I’m a
very spiritual person. The problem with me calling myself spiritual is the same
as with me calling myself theistic. It’s simply too confusing to throw myself
into the same soup as a Jain, a liberal Christian, a militant Islamist, a
Jehovah’s Witness, and millions of others who are convinced that they and they
alone can define words like God and spirituality correctly. Of
all the religion-oriented labels I’ve experimented with over time, atheist fits
me best. It takes the supposedly higher wisdom that, “God [and, by
implication, spirituality] is that about which nothing can be said,” and it
says nothing. It just looks at life with wonder because that’s really all there
is for us in the brief flash in the darkness that constitutes our existence.
It
is very hard for me to imagine that the flash will soon be over for me, and I
would like it very much if, instead of no longer existing, I awakened after death
to find that I had been God all along, and that my earthly life had been but a
dream in which I denied my own existence. But courage lies in going where the
evidence takes us, no matter how much we would like it to take us somewhere
else, and I have done that. It is only believers, many believers anyway, whose
mouths say they believe but whose lives say they don’t, and it is only
believers who pray, “I believe; help thou my unbelief.”
For
what freedom is worth, I am free of all that. Yet, just as I see religious
people as being prisoners to religion, I see all people as being prisoners to
one thing or another, and I also see all people as being prisoners to life
itself. The older I get, and the more I suffer from chronic pain, the more I
realize just how cold, dark, and dank some of the cells within life’s prison
can be. When I was younger and had my health, I could at least can find reason
to hope that there might be better days ahead, but the time has come
when I realize that those days, such as they were, have passed. As dire as
this sounds, it has had the advantage of pushing my focus ever more inward. We
all play the role of Don Quixote to our own lives, and this means that we are
each our single greatest hero and our most pathetic fool.
