Atheist or Agnostic?

No word sets atheists to foaming at the mouth more than agnostic—not evangelical, not born-again, not even Baptist. To the avowed atheist, the mere agnostic is a lily-livered, weak-kneed and spineless specimen of infuriating indecision.

Besides a fundamental misunderstanding of what an agnostic is, and a possible ignorance of the fact that almost all their cherished and oft-quoted icons considered themselves agnostics and not atheists, self-proclaimed atheists may be confused on another point: Their attitude toward the non-nonbeliever.

First, the misunderstanding:

While an atheist rejects all religions, and denies the existence of God (and so flaunts the same certitude as the devoutly religious), the agnostic admits that he does not know.

There might not be a God: Science alone can explain the universe, for example, all except for how something can arise out of nothing, and if we need an explanation for that, why bring in God?—why not say that if something always had to exist, it might as well be the universe as God?

There might not be a God, which might explain the random nature of life and death, the prevalence of misery and suffering, the apparent predominance of evil.

Yet again, there might be a God, which might account for our intimations of something greater than ourselves, for our apperception of mystery and beauty in the universe, for our love and fellow-feeling, for our sense of individual and collective purpose and destiny.

There may be a God we can apprehend and explain, but none of the world’s religions have yet apprehended and explained Him to the atheist’s satisfaction. The agnostic doubts all the explanations, but admits that he can’t be certain they’re all fallacious. It may be highly unlikely that a God of love will one day roast me like a peanut forever and ever for dancing on Sunday, but the agnostic, while doubting it, admits that it is not impossible.

Atheism is a belief; agnosticism is based on knowledge (or, rather, the lack of it). 

Now, for the attitude:

Many an atheist is put out by the agnostic’s “gutlessness,” and his scorn implies that he himself is genuinely gutsy. Why is the agnostic gutless?-For not avowing something he’s not sure of? And why should the atheist see himself as courageous?—just for avowing something that most people don’t agree with, even if it’s unprovable?

The atheist proclaims that there is no God, standing up to ridicule and censure from those people whose judgments he doesn’t value in the first place. The agnostic says he doesn’t know, incurring no one’s wrath but everyone’s pity.

The atheist basks in the novelty and daring of his opinion, while the agnostic cowers in the corner with his uncertainty.

The atheist forms his conclusions based on the puerile or pathetic beliefs of the religious; the agnostic concedes the value and sometimes the power of belief. 

The atheist insists that his certainties are more certain than the believer’s; the agnostic suggests that there are no certainties.

The atheist scoffs, openly or to himself, at the religious impulse, seeing it as weak-minded or deluded. The agnostic is confounded by the fact that so many people—including people far more intelligent than he—are religious.

A lot of learning is a dangerous thing

   A poll done on Facebook resulted in more than half the respondents averring that creationism should be taught in public schools. This startles me only because I thought the percentage of the scientifically illiterate among us would be much higher.

   Allied to the average man’s misunderstanding of evolution is his fear of it, often heightened and even encouraged by his religion. Every one of the world’s religions is, at best, an intermediary between its adherents and the truth. And every religion worth its salt must conform to the intelligence and understanding of its audience. Religion must not let the naked truth go abroad, but must clothe it in myth and allegory. Even Jesus, who espoused no religion, chose to speak in parables in order to make the truth palatable.

   When religion presents the truth, even in a diluted or adulterated form, it renders a service to mankind, but more often it does damage by employing a lie to convey a truth. For example, Jesus was preaching evolution when he said that the kingdom of God is within us and we must strive to realize it by becoming God-like. The lie of Christ-inanity is that we were made in God’s image, as the apple of his eye, but that each of us is born in sin and all we can do is pull ourselves up out of the slime.     

God: That is the question

A review of The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life, by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr. 

   Sigmund Freud never met C. S. Lewis, but the author of this book imagines a debate between the two on the subject of God (and some corollary topics). He also teaches a course at Harvard contrasting the two men’s “worldviews.”

   Nicholi calls Freud “the atheist’s touchstone,” and refers to Lewis as “perhaps the twentieth century’s most popular proponent of faith based on reason.” Lewis himself was an atheist for the first half of his adulthood, and Freud, indeed, was one of his touchstones. When he became a Christian he often challenged the ideas of Freud’s that he had earlier embraced. Or as Nicholi puts it in his prologue: “In subsequent writings, he (Lewis) provides cogent responses to Freud’s arguments…”—thus indicating early on where his own sympathies lie.

     Freud called religion “the universal obsessional neurosis,” and was a lifelong atheist, although as the author suggests he may have wavered in his disbelief from time to time. (In a letter to a friend he wrote, “Science of all things seems to demand the existence of God…”) Freud thought that one’s early, ambivalent attitude toward one’s parents formed the basis for one’s “deep-seated wish for God.”

   Freud’s atheistic underpinnings came largely from his reading of Ludwig Feuerbach, a German philosopher who, in his The Essence of Christianity, asserted that religion is just a projection of human need. “Divine wisdom is human wisdom…the secret of theology is anthropology…the absolute mind is the so-called finite subjective mind,” Feuerbach wrote.

   Lewis, like Freud, grew into an atheist as a teenager. His mother died horribly at home when he was 7, and Lewis recalled that his earliest “religious experience” was praying in vain for her life. He was sent to a miserable boarding school where, he said, he read his Bible, “lived in hope,” and “attempted to obey my conscience.” When the school closed he was sent to another, whose matron took him under her wing and shared her growing unbelief with him. Under her influence, and that of his reading in the classics, his faith began to collapse. Another teacher, William Kirkpatrick, helped drive the final nail in the coffin, although the corpse would be resurrected years later.

   (To be continued…)      

Easter Parade of Fools

Regarding our habit
Of venerating a rabbit
That brings us all eggs--
Just who's pulling our legs?

Easter's always a grand day, with chocolate abounding and wine overflowing (in our household, at least), an occasion to ponder one of life's profound mysteries:

How can we be so gullible?

It's a time to reread the Book of Luke, the lovely story (most beautiful in the King James Version) that takes us from the birth of Jesus in a stable, attended by shepherds of the field, to his calamitous end and beyond, when the slain Christ apparently busts out of his tomb and, after checking in with a few former friends, takes off for parts unknown.

The most charming (or off-putting, depending on your point of view) aspects of the whole story are it fairy-tale elements. The son of God comes to earth and sets up shop as a carpenter, disappears for a dozen years or so and then returns to embark on a brief career as an itinerant preacher. Though penniless, he attracts an entourage, and travels from town to town, relying on the kindness of strangers for room and board while entertaining the masses with speeches and parables and the preforming of miracles. He walks on water and raises the dead and converts water into wine. He naturally attracts the notice of the authorities, who begin to ask questions and end up hounding him to death. His death, however, is a triumph, and far from the end of things. He has promised to return and set things right.

It is Luke's Jesus that has come down to us, for the most part--the gentle, soft-spoken, sociable soul who loves children and is beloved by women, who bestows his miracles liberally, and who is always kind and considerate, even unto death. And it is Luke's point of view that has become a bedrock of the faith, in particular his conviction that Jesus was the long-awaited messiah who would come back to earth, after a three-day vacation, and establish his kingdom. The fact that we're still waiting hasn't dampened the expectation.

God the Superfluous

Attended services this morning, held on my back deck, of the Church of God the Superfluous.

God, I prayed, if you exist, forgive us for our careless, selfish and unworthy thoughts of you. We have looked upon you as a gift giver and a bribe taker, as a sentimental old fool (with a beard) to be flattered and cajoled. We have ascribed all of our mean and scurvy human qualities to you, and depicted you as cruel, vindictive, grasping, jealous, angry, petty, vainglorious. We have leached all the magnificence and splendor out of you in trying to understand you.

We have created you in our own image, in the belief that man is the measure of all things.

God, we have made you the repository of all our confused notions about good and evil. We have made you bear the intolerable burden of perfect goodness, and have cursed you in our hearts for not making us good.
We have made you the author of the universe, and held you accountable for the narrative, which we perceive but dimly.

In our immense self-concern we have demanded that you give meaning to all of our lives.

Forgive us, o Lord, we beseech Thee, for making Thee superfluous.

Nature, long in tooth and nail

Because our natural world is so pleasing to the human eye, it must be the handiwork of God. So the argument goes. It is usually put forth by those with little firsthand experience, apparently, of Nature.
Have you been out in the woods lately? Swarms of gnats, savage horseflies, blood-ravening mosquitoes, and homicidal spiders assault you at every step. A poem, addressed to God:

Why/The fly?/And at that/The gnat?

The spider strings its webs between low-hanging branches, in the air lanes of flying insects, and those that are trapped it often devours alive. All through the murmurous glade, creatures pursue and are pursued; the race is to the swift, and as for those that stumble and fall, seldom is the courtesy paid to let death descend before beginning the meal.

“What a book a devil’s chaplain might right on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature!” That was Charles Darwin, devout to begin, who gradually lost his faith through long observation of random and remorseless nature.

The woods offer a pretty prospect from my back deck. All art is deception.

Stairway to Heaven

A recent poll of self-identified Republicans, conducted by the Daily Kos, asked the question: “Do you believe that the only way for an individual to go to heaven is though Jesus Christ, or can one make it to heaven through another faith?”
Sixty-seven percent said that Jesus was the only way; fifteen percent said there might be another way, and eighteen percent weren’t sure. I’m wondering about that eighteen percent. Were they not sure about the proper way to get to Heaven, or were they maybe not sure about the whole idea of Heaven itself? I’ll assume the former, while wishing for the latter.
Two thousand and three people participated in the poll, which means that, at most, about 360 people might have answered: What a stupid question! You’re assuming that I subscribe to the inane and idiotic notion of Heaven. Do you think I’m a child?
Polls can be very revealing, but they seldom tell the whole story. In this case, they can only hint at how depressingly inchoate or infantile most people’s beliefs are. Some corollary questions might have been useful or interesting. Such as:
What will this Heaven be like? What will you do there? And if you’re bored with this life, why do you want another that will go on forever?