Immanence, transcendence, and cannibalistic pedophiles

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. 

15, today

Bonnie spends two or three hours everyday walking into walls, one after another after another. Bump, bump, crash. Bump, bump, crash. When she dies, the first thing I’m going to do is to wash smudges off walls. Until then, why bother? It would be like raking leaves if leaves never stopped falling. I’ve heard people talk about how well dogs adjust to being blind. Bonnie became blind at 13, turned 15 today, and the adjustment has all been downhill. I doubt that this dog (who once figured out for herself that could carry a ball and Frisbee at once by putting the ball in the bottom of the Frisbee) has the mental capacity to adjust, although it’s hard to tell given that she’s not only totally blind, she’s 90% deaf. There isn’t a day goes by but what Peggy and I don’t wish that she would die already.

Nothing ever brought us more joy or more sorrow than Bonnie. I blame throwing tennis balls to her with a throwing stick, hard, hundreds of times a week for more than a decade for ruining my shoulders. I threw those balls because she needed the exercise. Now, I’m mad at the universe for making me suffer for the rest of my life because I tried to do right by my dog. Yet, I must admit that I mostly enjoyed our ballgames—as well as hiking together and her running alongside my bike and, oh yeah, camping (except for when she rolled in something). 

People were forever stopping to visit as I threw her ball across a drainage canal and she ran to a pedestrian bridge to cross the canal for it. They would say something about how fast she was, and then she would shift into yet another gear and go even faster. Sometimes, ten or fifteen dogs would gather in this same field, and every last one of them would be trying to catch Bonnie, and she would be running in and out among them like a fighter plane among bombers.

In her second year, she turned into a hellion and started attacking other dogs, including her lifelong friends, so that was the end of doggie friendships. After that, the only dog she ever played with was this great big old part husky named Freeman. Freeman liked to kill things, and he would have killed Bonnie if he could have caught her, but she was so fast that she could run in, nip his hindquarters, and make her getaway before he could get turned around. Freeman’s person and I used to have a lot of fun watching our dogs’ little game, but we were also glad that Freeman stayed pretty close to us because we never knew but what we might have to make him cough up Bonnie (I know, you’re not supposed to break up a dog fight; you’re supposed to stand there and watch your dog gurgle through a crushed trachea after you let her do something dangerous).

Sure enough, one day Bonnie was running backwards with the usual derision in her eyes and a big smile on her face, no more than ten feet in front of Freeman’s gaping jaws, when she tripped and landed on her back. At that moment, Freeman became an optimist and doubled his speed. Bonnie didn’t just get up, she exploded up, spun around in the air, and hit the ground running. In that moment, I was glad my dog was okay, but in the next, I wondered if she would ever play with Freeman again. As it turned out, she never stopped playing, neither did she stop running in reverse right in front of him and occasionally tripping. I just loved the spirit in her that said, “The world is my oyster, and I can do any damn thing I please.” I spent half of my time trying to protect Bonnie from the results or her own cockiness (the pink collar that Peggy bought for the little puppy that she wanted to name Clair just never did seem right on the dog that became Bonnie).

To see Bonnie as she is now, so beaten by life that she’s afraid of a cat that doesn’t mean her any harm, is very hard. I’m tempted to say that it’s harder than the death of my mother, but I guess it’s just hard in a different way. So, why don’t we put her down? I could even do it myself as far as that goes (I really have it in me), but she still enjoys her 45-minute walk each day, and she still wags her tail when I roll her tennis ball to her. When the tail stops wagging, it will be time.

Five good flicks that feature religion

The Apostle. Robert Duvall wrote, directed, produced, financed, and starred in this film about a holiness preacher who is both tragically fallible and consumed by his devotion to God. This is a good film for the religious, the non-religious, and maybe even some anti-religion people.

Hate Crime (Seth Peterson, Chad Donella) is about two men; one homophobic and the other having suffered the loss of his gay partner in a hate crime. Christianity is represented as having a positive influence in one church and a negative influence in another.

Letting Go of God (Julia Sweeney). Julia is funny, poignant, and thought-provoking as she chronicles the loss of her religious faith in a film that is honest and inoffensive. The chain of her thoughts as she pondered God's existence was much like my own.

Religulous (Bill Mahr). Bill travels to many places to question religious people of many faiths. His questions are blunt and sometimes irreverent, but they're also honest so I'm going to label this film as suitable for the religious and the non-religious. 

Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic. If you want to see religion trashed unmercifully by a brilliant comedian who plays the part of an insensitive and bigoted narcissist, you'll love Sarah Silverman. Even if you hated her TV appearances, you ought to see this film.

Voting day

I voted today—Oregon has mail-in balloting—but I listened to the debate tonight for laughs, and was glad I did because I learned a lot about America. For example, “America remains the one indispensible nation,” said Obama, although he didn’t clarify whether he meant that all the other nations put together are dispensable, or whether it’s just some of them, or maybe only one of them that the rest of the world could do without. 

Romney informed me, twice in as many sentences, that, “America is the hope of the world,” and I was delighted to learn that everyone looks up to us the way they do, because we’re certainly worthy of it—I mean, just look at all the good things we do with our missiles and stuff. Then Romney accused Obama of wanting to take money away from our military, and Obama looked hurt, but he must have pulled himself together pretty quickly because he said with obvious pride that, under him, America spends more money on its military than the next ten biggest military spending nations on earth put together, and I thought, whoa, way to go, bro.

Our ability to kick ass combined with our willingness to kick ass is probably why both men agreed that it’s America’s job to “continue promoting peace in the world” (I hadn’t heard that we had already been doing it, but I was glad to find out). After their touching words about how peaceful America is, they agreed that war with Iran is certain if that country doesn’t stop trying to build a nuclear bomb, and they expressed their mutual willingness to also go to war in defense of Israel if anyone should mess with Israel. Like, man, let’s hope nobody attacks Israel, or it and Iran will be two more wars we’re fighting to bring peace to the world. 

In case you’re wondering, I voted for the Green Party candidate for president. She’s in the picture above, the caption of which refers to the arrest of her and her running mate during the last debate (they were protesting the fact that only only two of the candidates got invited to the debate). The rest of the caption concerns Obama’s willingness to ignore parts of the Bill of Rights that don’t suit him. You think the Constitution protects you, and then you discover that it’s only as good as the guy in charge says it is, and two of those guys in a row have ignored what we used to call our “inalienable rights.” The funny thing is that hardly anyone seems to care. This was exemplified by the fact that the subject didn’t even come up during the debates. Maybe Romney and Obama were too busy thinking about who to bomb next in the cause of peace.