There Is No God

As I said, I do have my days of atheism. I suppose one could classify me as an agnostic, but I reject that label because it seems too wishy-washy. I don't know if there's a God (or Gods) or not, but that's hardly unique to agnosticism. And I don't have periods where I don't know if I believe in the divine or not; I have periods where I do, and periods where I don't.

There are two camps of atheism, to my mind, and in which one you fall depends on your own personal bent, I imagine. And of course there are atheists who are just mainline, no-camp atheists in the same way that there are mainline Protestants who aren't fundamentalists or extremely liberal.  No-camp atheists include people who don't believe in God not by choice but by default: they weren't raised religiously, they never really had any experience of religion that was transformative, they don't think about their beliefs or lack thereof, they don't care, or any combination thereof which has resulted in atheism without a choice made. I suspect a certain percentage of the church-going population of the world are secretly just atheists by default; they've always gone to church, but they don't really believe it.

We're also not going to discuss theological nihilists, who reject any sort of belief in anything. That would, on its face, seem to be atheism, but atheism isn't a lack of belief, it's a lack of belief in God.  I don't know of too many people who truly don't believe in anything.  Atheists are even now angrily clamoring that they don't believe, they know, but guess what atheists: you believe in atheism. It's not "faith" but it is a belief in the same way that every idea has its believers. Somewhere at the bottom of your logically-structured atheism is an axiom of some sort that you hold to be self-evident, but axioms are beliefs that we agree to hold in common so we can draw logical conclusions from them. You believe too.

So there are two camps of atheism that I've seen: the Non-Believers and the Can't-Believers. The Non-Believers hold a belief: God doesn't exist. Usually there are corollaries like "the world would be better off if we all stopped believing in God" but "the world would be better off if we all believed [blank]" is hardly unique to atheists. Non-Believers believe in Non, that is, a lack of God. Richard Dawkins et. al. would probably argue this point, but I'm just classifying them, not telling them what they have to believe.

Non-Belief can be beneficial; it promotes science, tries to dispel myth, and seeks truth. Its adherents are no less moral than anyone else, and they ask questions which should be asked. Many of them fall into the trap of confusing a belief in God with being religiously organized, and so they ascribe faults to non-atheists which should instead be ascribed to their churches/sects/creeds. It's too bad, because they do make decent points about religion and about belief, but by conflating the two, they leave themselves open to attacks on both.  Religions will point out that the groups which have caused the most destruction in history were not religious; any fanatical adherents of causes can cause destruction, especially if the cause is inherently destructive, which most religions aren't. And believers will simply say that all the points of the Non-Believers should properly be ascribed to religions, and that belief in God itself is not the problem.

The other camp, the Can't-Believers, are a more interesting group. I would venture a guess that there are more "converts" here, although I have no numbers to support that guess and there are plenty of "converts" to Non-Belief. But Can't-Believers almost have to have previously been believers, or at least on the fence. This is the group that includes people whose faith has been destroyed, either by some tragedy or by coming from a restrictive faith into the open and finding that they can no longer believe at all. One might further classify by what a Can't-Believer doesn't believe in: God as a whole, a loving/caring God, a God who interacts with the world at all, a non-capricious God, etc. And some Can't-Believers still believe in God but have no faith; they may hate God or reject God or some other form of anti-God belief.

Can't-Believers may masquerade as believers in a way that Non-Believers don't. They may continue to be religious because it's habit, because it brings them comfort, for the community, or in hope that they might one day recover their lost faith. They tend to be less proselytizing than Non-Believers: you won't find too many best-sellers written by Can't-Believers for the very simple reason that they probably don't care if other people believe. If they do, then they're probably on their way to become a Non-Believer. I find myself in this camp when I visit atheism.

There's a terrible, heart-wrenching quality about being unable to believe, having one's faith destroyed. You had something and you've lost it, but you're not yet to the point where you necessarily think that you're better without it.  Maybe that's a distinction that could be drawn as well: some atheists feel they're better that way, and others do not. There, I would safely classify myself as agnostic, because I don't know. I don't know if I'd be better with the belief or without it, because I exist in both places simultaneously.

There are days when I think that there can't possibly be a God because if there were, such a God would have to be a terrifying god in the style of the Aztecs and Assyrians, a god who would demand blood sacrifice or who would punish sinners. And I don't want to believe in a God like that. It's a strange feeling, believing that God must be a kind, forgiving, and just God, and yet believing that such a God can't exist. It's a belief in something that you hope is wrong. I don't know whether those who belong to religions where God is an angry, vengeful God feel the same way. I would expect that they don't; they believe in this God and all they want to do is to do whatever their religion says will keep this God happy with them.  Theirs is a faith, a faith I don't envy but which is entirely different from my experience, which is a lack of faith. I lose faith in a kind, forgiving, just God. But I hope that I'm wrong, because I still believe that there could be one.

I don't know if that makes me an atheist on those days or not. I think it fits the bill: I stop believing in God because I believe God can't exist. But perhaps it should be more properly said to be a loss of faith in that in which I believe. Lack of faith doesn't make you an atheist. I'm not sure what it does make you; afiduciist isn't a word and it's not easy to spell or say, and apistisist is similarly difficult and sounds vaguely dirty. But while many times "faith" is equated with "religion," so someone who has lost faith would be said to be a-religious, I think "faith" is simpler than religion. If belief is the rock, faith is the hands that hold you to that rock, that keep you from being swept away in the storm. Without the rock, the hands are useless, but if the hands lose grip, the rock doesn't cease to exist; it simply doesn't help you when you're washed away. You might be washed back up on the same rock or another, and might then grab hold again, but those rocks do not appear and disappear.

So perhaps I don't have periods of atheism, but rather periods of loss of faith. That might or might not be more hopeful, depending on whether I think that belief in God is a bad thing. For the record, I don't; I think that many beliefs, like tools, can be used poorly or wrongly and can cause actions which are evil even if the belief itself doesn't support such an action. I reject the idea that belief in God must be incompatible with science, or that it must mean that I am unrealistic. In fact, in some periods where I lose faith, it's because I can't rationalize my faith with my realism, and realism often wins in such cases. But that is an issue with faith, not with belief.

On the other hand, I don't believe that morality requires a higher power. On days when I'm feeling almost atheistic, I might even say that a higher power is morality, and that God is simply the sum of existence. I'm fascinated with the question of why people are moral, in the absence of belief in God or with such belief. That, to me, is a question divorced from theist/atheist sparring. Atheists get asked the question a lot as if it's an indictment of atheism; I ask the question because I think answering it supports whatever structure a person has. But that's a question for another time.

I think it's beneficial, if sad, to lose one's faith. Not forever. But to get lost is a good way to see things one otherwise wouldn't have seen. Doubting Thomas gets a lot of flak because he didn't just trust Jesus, so Christians assume they are supposed to be blindly faithful as well. But questions and doubts are healthy and important. Debate strengthens both positions, and questions refine faith. Anyone who tells you not to question or doubt doesn't want you to look hard at what they're saying. Which means it's probably either wrong, or it's leading you somewhere you wouldn't go ordinarily.

When I Was a Child I Thought As a Child

No, actually I do have something to add to the article to which I just linked.

If there is a God, I want a good one. I'm not interested in being a sinner in the hands of an angry God. I am a sinner; even when my thinking swings toward the atheistic, I am a sinner. I would love to believe that the power of God also lies in His/Her/Its/Their infinite forgiveness.

I'm about to make a point which might seem obvious to many, but bear with me.

Consider a family whose child has been brutally murdered by an unrepentant man who freely admits his guilt but claims he has done nothing wrong, or that he doesn't care if he did something wrong. I promise, I'm not trying to draw parallels to any recent events; this just happened to be the set-up to the parable that I wanted to use. The family can do one of three things: they can ignore this man completely, treating him as a random act that caused a tragedy; they can hate this man for killing their child; or they can forgive this man whether he asks for it or not.

On the face of it, the choice seems obvious, and it's one which I would have a hard time resisting, were I in that situation: they hate this brazen murderer and want him to suffer. It's natural; who wouldn't hate someone like that. Many people would hate this man even though he didn't touch their lives at all. He certainly seems worthy of hatred.

But hate gives power to that which one hates. By hating someone, they live inside you, causing you pain, because hatred isn't an enjoyable thing, at the core. It can become very pleasant, but it feeds on you, it stunts you, makes it harder for you to love anything, and love is far more wonderful than that visceral thrill of hatred can ever be. So some would make the choice to ignore t this man. You can't give him power over you if you treat him as a non-entity. Ignore him and it's like he goes away. You can grieve and move on.

The trouble with this is that you're still giving power to those you ignore. You have to consciously act to keep from paying attention. Better thinkers than I have pointed out that willful denial and ignorance actually take quite a bit of work, particularly when other things also must be denied or ignored in order to maintain that fiction.

That third option seems like a bad idea, though. Aren't you releasing him from guilt by forgiving him? He doesn't want your forgiveness. Isn't forgiving him the same as agreeing with him? And how can you forgive someone who has taken so much from you, caused you so much pain?  I'm no saint, and I'm pretty sure I would let that hatred fester in my heart and it might eat me alive. And even as I knew that, I don't know if I could forgive a person who took someone I love from me.

Those of the hardcore camp tend to say, "No forgiveness," like it means, "Responsibility." But if my hypothetical family forgives the murderer, justice can still be served. Forgiveness isn't the same as release from punishment. Forgiveness is more for the forgiver than the forgivee.  In modern society, we seem to have forgotten that; we assume that seeking forgiveness is the same thing as seeking a release from culpability.  It isn't. Only by acknowledging your responsibility can you truly seek forgiveness, and forgiveness doesn't release you from an obligation to make good your transgression.  Being a forgiving person doesn't have to mean that you let people do bad things to you and get away with it.

It takes a certain power to forgive. And by making that choice, the family would have power over the man who murdered their child. They would be saying, "You can't make us hurt, make us stick our heads in the ground. You can't own us by your action. And we make this decision whether or not you accept it, and there's nothing you can do about it."  That's power.

Since I'm not Jesus and I didn't really tell a parable but rather gave some thoughts on a situation, let's draw some parallels. 1) For "unrepentant murderer" substitute "God." Suppose that instead of a murder, we're talking about a tornado. I don't want to argue anything other than that people also have three options when encountering a supposed "act of God" which hurts them: they can hate God and ask why God caused it; they can believe God works in mysterious ways or convince themselves that God had no hand in it; or they can forgive God. That's a novel thought, although it does presuppose some things that I'll get into next.

2)For "unrepentant murderer" substitute "humanity." If you're a Christian, you believe that Jesus was God's child (and possibly also God, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.  Hell, you may believe that we're all God's children (I think that's a wonderful belief).  So we've killed at least one of God's children, and a great many of us are pretty unrepentant about it.  We're indirectly responsible for the horrible deaths of may of God's children, really.  And God can either hate us (which would be hard to do if God is love, as many have said, correctly I feel), ignore us (the watchmaker God), or forgive us.  I'd rather God was the third option, frankly.

But that was all a wild excursion: the central point I was trying to make is that I'm a sinner. And I'm a child.  I want a God who's all-powerful in the "magical rain control" way, not in the "being able to be there with us in the storm," kind of way. The whole "that was when I was carrying you" thing comes to mind; notice that Jesus doesn't say, "The times you only saw one set of footprints were because I had gone off to magically make everything better because I love you." I want Magic Jesus, not carrying Jesus, because I'm selfish and childish and I just want my parents to take care of everything.

That's not a good way for God to work, though. If magic Jesus fixes everything, what's the point? We'd have no free will; God would simply decide what was best for us and do it, and we'd have to deal with it. Or God would be unfair and favor some kids over others, because sometimes there are mutually-incompatible "storms" to fix.  Many people believe one or both of those things, although they may not see it that way; either they think "it's all part of God's plan" or they pray and expect Magic Jesus to do what they say because they're special.

I'm reluctant to get my theology from such a campy source, but perhaps God's omnipotence lies in the infinite capacity to carry us. Carry doesn't presuppose that there's any amelioration of whatever made it impossible for us to walk any further; it just says that God is our support when we need a support. Faith is the rock to which we cling when the waves threaten to wash us away. That doesn't say that the rock makes the waves stop.

But as I said, my response is a childish, "If God is so powerful and so good, how can God cause bad things to happen to good people, or if God doesn't cause those things, how can God stand by and allow those things to happen, and in either case, either God isn't all-powerful or God isn't all-good." I want Magic Jesus. And I'm almost positive that that's not how it works. Sometimes things happen and all we can do is weather them. And sometimes things happen because we made mistakes, not because an angry God is punishing us for our sins or because God isn't there. Sometimes it was in our power to save ourselves all along, but we spent all our time ignoring the problem or hoping Magic Jesus would come along and save us.

Again, please read the article to which I linked in the previous post. It is a concept of power which is almost completely foreign to the human way of thinking, which is why it makes sense that it would be true, since God's ways are not our ways. But it also makes sense because despite the childish impulse, a God who was powerful in the way we understand power would be a pretty lousy God to have.

Omnipotence

I'm not in the habit of simply re-linking, but I'm not sure I can add to this amazing piece by David R. Henson.  It crystallizes a lot of things for me. Perhaps it will be similarly illuminating for you.  I'm not necessarily in agreement with everything he says, but it's a way of thinking to which I had never been exposed before in Christian thought.

Sleeping Through Storms: Rethinking Theodicy, Natural Disasters and God’s Omnipotence

The Nature of Things

I wrote an excursion into Christianity and a talk with an apostle, plus what the purpose of religion is (and also some other stuff), but it was long and off-topic, so I'm linking to it here because there was a somewhat causal link at first and you might say they're peas in a pod. You can keep reading instead for a talk with the author of the following passage. Or do both.

If you can talk about it,
it ain't Tao.
If it has a name,
it's just another thing.

Tao doesn't have a name.
Names are for ordinary things.

Stop wanting stuff. It keeps you from seeing what's real.
When you want stuff, all you see are things.

These two statements have the same meaning.
Figure them out, and you've got it made.

I always approve of down-to-earth translation (although I also completely approve of poetry and think that most things in the KJV sound better than their equivalents in the vernacular of today, albeit that one shouldn't read the KJV as anything but poetry, really) and this one struck me.  As many things on the Internet, it's unattributed (but please let me know where it's from so I can buy the rest).

The thing about translations of Chinese, and the Dao De Jing (or the Tao Te Ching; I'm Pinyin-Wade-Giles agnostic here) is that you can basically take the task of translating the Bible (yes, that English Bible that you've read wasn't originally written in English, and I don't mean to be condescending here but people really do think that) and multiply by some number greater than one. It's hard.  The characters don't mean letters, they mean words, and the nuance of the words is difficult to capture in translation.  Plus, the Dao is pretty vague.  If you've ever read some of the Dao, you know that... well, the Dao that can be read is not the eternal Dao.  Sorry, little Daoism joke there.

The Buddha said that the cause of suffering is desire. The Dao De Jing says that desiring named things causes one to lose touch with the real, the true, that Dao that cannot be named or expressed.  The "suffering" of Buddhism is not just stubbing your toe or being sad. It's existential. It's a disconnect with the truth, or an inability to cope with change. The Dao says everything is always changing, and nothing you can name or try to make concrete is real. "Stop naming things!" says Lao Tzu (or Laozi, but not as familiarly to Western audiences) in our straight-talk above. But he's also saying, "Stop trying to hold on to things." Stop trying to keep things from changing. Stop with the desire.

But Lao Tzu (who exists for the purposes of attribution)... well, you can guess that I had a chat with him, and once we bridged the mutual-incomprehensibility divide, he had some things to say. Li Bai recommended a rice-wine bar, but Lao (he insisted we be on first name terms because he's given up family names and honorifics) just dragged me to the tea house (he's surprisingly sprightly for his age) and we discussed this and that over tea, which was excellent and probably a better choice than rice wine would have been anyway. Edited highlights, because he also talked about the rest of the book.

"Dao is the way. Not like Jesus, but like him as well. Not like the Buddhist Path, and yet like that too. Dao is the way you can't follow. I still can't. I was telling you that you can't follow it because if you try and you can, it's not Dao. Cannot count the number of minds I've completely blown with shit like that. The Zen cats made a whole religion of nothing but shit like that.

"So you're wondering what the point of it is if you can't do it. Change is fact, dig. I dig on the I Ching as well, you know, although I didn't write it. I don't think anyone did. It's just accretion. Probably started out as some cat getting drunk and just grooving. But none of that's in what you've got now. Maybe everyone wrote it. Pretty mind-blowing to think about.

"Change. But what I was driving at was that you cats are too literal. You're too about rules that have to be handed down from who knows when by who knows who, just like the I Ching. Except the I Ching is always changing, but religions and their rules, they don't change because tradition blah blah blah. You're reading books that are older than me and saying they didn't change. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with those books, but you can't follow them because they're things, dig?

"Dao ain't a thing, like I said. Go around looking for things and you're gonna wind up bluesville, baby. Lots of cats think they're all that, have all the things ever, but like Dylan said, you know, times are a-changing. I dig on that, you feel me?"

We'll probably hear from Lao again, but for right now, the central point I'd like to make is that sometimes we're too hidebound to beliefs and traditions. Certainly, as humans it's difficult to live in a constant state of flux, and tradition is a powerful thing, sometimes worthy of preservation for no reason other than that it connects us with those who came before us. When change conflicts with tradition, we must examine both.

Belief doesn't need to be set in stone. One can believe in God without believing that one knows every aspect of God, that one's picture of God is the true and only. I'm not just speaking to fundamentalists here; we all have things we "know" to be true which we never consider in the light of new situations.

What does it serve to have a belief that is never tested? Is that a belief, or a blinder? Change happens, and sometimes we hold fast because the change will swing back around, and sometimes we should let go of our beliefs and allow them to be reshaped to get closer to the eternal ideal. But if there's one thing that everyone should take away from this homily, it's that the eternal ideal isn't achievable. The way that can be named, seen, experienced, traveled, is not The Way, capital letters, full stop.

If you name the path, if you mark the path, if you even believe yourself to be on the path, you're missing the point. You can't refine your definition of truth until it becomes true. You can't define truth so specifically that it is always true. Truth is bigger than that. Goodness, faith, love, God, whatever it might be, is bigger than that.

There's more to the Dao than that, but that's what I wanted to take away from this. Stop being inflexible. Stop believing you know what's up, because you don't. Stop trying to tie everything down, because all you're tying down is yourself. Sometimes, there's a truth that's bigger than rules. Sometimes, just because it says so in a book, it ain't so. We're all lost in darkness, searching for the light, but it's the light that matters, not its direction or distance, not the path we take or how often we have to turn along the way.

But in the end, all of that is the dao that can be named. And that ain't The Dao.

Thoughts on West vs. East

Asian religion often seems, in the macro, to focus much more on giving up material things, leaving behind named things, and so forth. People are always listing that as a difference. I could list a bunch of clobber texts from the Bible which say otherwise (far more than for homosexuality or abortion, even if I'm very charitable to those topics and their relatedness to Bible verses). OpenBible does a decent rundown, and I found those in two seconds on Google.  Sure, there are contradictions (yes, the Bible also contains contradictions) but the overarching theme seems to be, if I might be allowed to let Matthew speak for me, "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"

In other words, as Matthew told me over a glass of wine (well, he drank wine, I drank water), "Jesus basically was all about love. That was his nirvana, which is pretty cool, if you think about it. So not loving your fellow man means you can't love God, and not loving God is pretty much the veil of Maya, for those of you who swing that way. Yeah, Jesus said 'riches' a whole lot, but he really meant anything material. I mean, the guy washed the feet of the lowest, he gave away everything, including his life, for you miserable bastards, and he was pretty radically redistribute-the-wealth. It was hardcore, man. Do you really think the Pharisees wanted him dead because he was saying he was the son of God? How about the Romans? Their emperors went around saying they were gods, so what the heck do they care if some goat-eater from East FA says?

"Jesus, he was all about love, as I said. Sure, we ate.  Yeah, Jesus wasn't about starving yourself to death in order to love God; God loves you, so Jesus was pretty clear that that meant God wanted us to be happy and love each other. Sure, we had clothes. But you can bet your bottom dollar that if a beggar or a leper came up to JC and asked if he could have clothing, The Son would have gone around in his underoos so that beggar could have clothes.  Because it was Israel, and in case you hadn't noticed, Israel is pretty temperate.  And anyway, we wouldn't have let him; we would have found some clothes for him, because that's what love is.  Sometimes it doesn't mean giving up everything you have; sometimes it means giving something you have to help someone, even if you don't give everything. Yes, JC would like all rich men to give away all they own and live without concern for wealth, because he was hardcore like that. But he would have been okay with a rich man giving away as much wealth as he could.

"The man said plenty about how it was easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven. Guess what: he was talking metaphorically. A 'rich' man and a rich man are two different things. A 'rich' man cares only for wealth and himself, has no love in his heart, and refuses to love others so he doesn't love God. Man, he's already in Sheol. He doesn't get to know God. What worse punishment can there be? That's like a Hindu being stuck in the karmic wheel of rebirth. No God. No nirvana. No ur-being. Whatever you want to call it, that's pretty much self- explanatory, but The Son liked to explain stuff because he was a teacher, and people are, on the whole, pretty stupid. I was stupid as a crate of matzo when I hung out with JC.

"So listen, maybe followers of Christ's teachings look at the whole renouncing of worldly goods thing a bit differently than other religions.  And maybe there's a place for some wealth if used well, and a place for voluntary poverty if that's what lets you love God. But there is no Dao but Dao, man. No God but God, and you can't express Him or His love. You can only try to be a faint echo."

Well, Matt ran a bit long there, but I think he made some good points.  But we're not talking about Jesus or the Bible. We're talking about the Dao. I just wanted to make a point about how East and West aren't really as different as people would have you believe.  I'm not all wishy-washy "Oh they're all the same under the skin." There are differences definitely. But as far as giving up material things, there are similarities and Christians would do well to listen to what Jesus is saying.

At a deeper level, religions (even in Asia) differ as to character of life and the cause of that character. Buddhists believe that life is suffering and that desire causes suffering (boiled down to the point where it's almost useless).  Some Christians seem to believe that life is suffering as well, but many of those believe that the suffering is caused by original sin or by lack of offering yourself up to God. I don't think life has to be suffering for a Christian; the causes of suffering can be more temporal, or they can be related to lack of faith, but that doesn't have to mean that everything in life is unsatisfying.  The boiled down version of Buddhism above does great disservice to the tenets of Buddhism; to say "life is suffering" makes it sound like a living hell.  Suffering can mean having a hard time dealing with change, in which case "desire" might mean the desire to remain static in the face of change, which cannot be accomplished.

A Christian might say, "Put your faith in God to steer you right," in a time of suffering because of change or upheaval. A Daoist might tell you that change is constant and you must simply seek wisdom to find the way (dao means way, as well as a host of other things). A Buddhist would tell you to follow the Noble Eightfold Path to renounce the material. They're all trying to tell you that change can't be stopped, but they have different ways of doing it.

So maybe "suffering" isn't so much "living hell" as it is "separation from the divine." If you worship a deity or deities, suffering is removal from that faith, a loss of connection to the divine. If you believe that there is an eternal Truth that one must learn, being moved away from that truth would be suffering.  Even if you don't believe in any of these things, even if you're a "devout" athiest, you must suffer when you lose connection with whatever keeps you whole. Doesn't have to be mystical or involve flying spaghetti monsters. There are things we care about, and being disconnected from those things (even material possessions) causes suffering.

I don't really have a final thought; this rambled along rather disjointedly.  Life may be suffering, even if we don't feel it all the time. The path may be to give up the world completely, or it might be to love and share that love with everyone, or to cease to be concerned with worldly things, or any one of a billion other possibilities. I suspect that everyone has their own private answer to the question of what causes suffering. It's frequently said that in hard times, you learn what really matters. Often that's applied to belongings or people, but maybe it's just a general clarity of purpose. If so, maybe the point of religion is to bring that clarity without necessarily demanding the hard times. Or to guide you to that clarity when hard times inevitably happen. Maybe. I'm not choosing sides on it. I'll probably have another next time.