I can only spend so much time dedicated to the glue of this entry, because I frankly feel like it’s kind of boring. Not just boring, but juvenile even. I guess to start I’ll go ahead and mention something especially boring about myself: I’m an atheist. This is going to be a very atheist friendly post when I get to the meat of things, but I really want to preface by saying I find my atheism to be an unbearably dull aspect of myself. It wasn’t always like that, and I think that many other atheists can probably sympathize with my progression into atheism.
See, one of the more material things that distinguishes a religious individual from a non-religious one is that manner in which they arrived to religiosity (or lack thereof). Religion is so intertwined with culture that it’s probably a safe bet to state – without evidence on hand – that the majority of religious people are religious because they were raised in religion. Similarly, the (probable) majority of atheists were also raised in religion. Something just happens to them or they discover something that leads them to becoming an atheist.
I’m less interested in that actual dynamic, however than I am in what exactly “makes” somebody an atheist. I feel like it should perhaps go without saying, but I spend a lot of my time lurking in leftists circles on social media. Every now and then, religion comes up in conversation in a substantial way and names like Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins wind up being dropped. Of course, “leftists gonna leftists” and ultimately the problematic ideas that some of those folks have espoused over the years becomes the real point of contention. Side note… I think the official first law of modern leftist discourse is that any and all conversation will inevitably entropy to an unrelated tangent over ethical purity if allowed to go on for long enough in a vacuum. *ahem* More importantly, however, there seems to be a lot of mention of these individuals in the past tense.
My point is that I don’t think I’m the only person that finds their atheism to be an especially boring subject. I think a lot of atheists followed the same path in which they were introduced to these uber logical entities, and basically masturbated over their own hyper rational brains that developed from grasping the philosophical arguments about the existence of a god. We got to feel intellectually superior, earned or not, and we consumed the same information over and over again for so long that really… the whole topic just kind of became dull. I feel like you either get over yourself and start savoring the life you have, finding empathy along the way… or you wind up rubbing yourself raw until the only way you can get your fix is by dunking on those damn “feminazis” with your big logical brain.
Sadly, I did dabble in the latter for a time, but I feel like I’ve since settled into the former group, and that type of person seems to be the kind I frequently come across in those dreaded leftist spaces. It’s kind of incredible how the division has formed when I really think about it though. On one end we seem to have the bleeding heart social justice warriors, and then, on the other, the casual libertarians that like to remind you that facts don’t care about your feelings. This isn’t to say that all or even most of the people in these two groups journeyed to atheism as I’ve described… but certainly, the people who took that route did seem to wind up in one of the two gangs, for the most part.
I think, in a sense, both groups feel sort of betrayed by their upbringing, but one has channeled that into idealism while the other is trying to be as realistic as humanly possible. Nihilism is a powerful unifier between the two, but I think the “uber facts and logic” crowd kind of chose to lean into the hopelessness of their nihilism while the bleeding hearts sought to create equalizing meaning from thin air. But this isn’t to pass judgement on how fulfilled these two groups are. I know I was an unhappy person until I decided to try to scrape together some tangible reason for my being, so I’m definitely biased looking back at my “logic is the only thing that matters” former self. Of course, logic and reason do matter, but sometimes appeals to humanity are valid things.
Frankly, I’m kind of more concerned with what makes these two groups more similar, however. I know that I’ve commented before on how I feel death is something that truly levels the playing field. It’s something that we all have in common. It’s an impending occurrence in all of our lives. One of the biggest crises that new atheists experience is the overwhelming sadness that comes with realizing that this life is all we have. This is further exacerbated if, like myself, you go down the path of thinking about what even makes us living things to begin with. If I accept the idea that I’m not just a brain in a vat, and that I am truly a physical, conscious being that is interacting with other living beings… It doesn’t really get that much more comforting.
Ultimately, I had to conclude that the sum of what makes me me is just electricity. Neural pathways in my brain that contain my personality, my motivations, my memories. Everything that I am is this fragile and extremely finite net of electrical impulses. The curse of becoming an atheist via the route that I became one is that I suddenly had to come to terms with the fact that not only is this life all that I have. Oh no. In addition to that, my tiny existence is so fragile and so inconsequential that I can reduce it to a mere chemical reaction. My love of music, my love for others, my passions and aspirations are painfully finite. As soon as my time comes, those electrical impulses stop in an instant and vanish forever. I vanish forever. Undoubtedly, the logic and reason Renaissance gave a lot of people some useful tools for looking at the world, but the price paid was awfully high.
I grew up in a Catholic household, so not only did I lose my eternal soul, but so did my parents, my friends, and everybody I ever cared about. They became the same frail wisps of smoke in this unimaginably massive firestorm we call our universe. I won’t be reunited with my friends, family, and pets when my time comes. Our relationships won’t transcend time and space. They’ll instead fizzle out just like our memories and sense of self. I think that was the hardest part for me, to be honest. The thought of being eternally separated from everybody I love is a difficult thing to process. I was 13 years old when I started having these thoughts (well before youtube was even a thing). It wasn’t until I turned 27 that I was able to process the thoughts to the point that I could find some sort of metaphysical comfort. Even with that in mind, I don’t think I’ll ever stop dreading the inevitable loss of everything that I love.
I’ve brought this to a really bleak point, I know, but like I said above; I have a bleeding heart… So the conversation can’t just end there.
I’ve written before of the tension between logic and romanticism. To paraphrase myself: emotion is the spark that gives logic a purpose. This is the metaphysical tangent of that concept. Not a lot of people really talk about the type of finality that comes with being religious. We only talked about the litany of finality involved with atheistic concepts of death. Speaking as a former Christian, religion can allow us to know with absolute certainty how we got here, why we got here, where we’re going, and how long we’ll be around. While those certainties are so perfect and comforting, they can also be really detrimental to one’s desire to ask questions.
This is where the beauty of atheism honestly comes in. Losing religion is often described by atheists as a fundamentally liberating experience. No more are you confined by unjustified moral proclamations or the finality of certainty. Your mind is unchained and free to wonder and ponder the great questions. I think it’s in our nature to want an answer. In fact, I think that’s one of the reasons religion is so difficult to walk away from.
Atheism means that nothing is off limits in your own mind. Crossing over to atheism also carries with it an implicit understanding that we actually know incredibly little. While the “new atheist” movement honed countless minds and did initially seem to foster that inquisitive nature, the humility was lost somewhere along the way. I used to get defensive when theists would tell me that atheists need to quit shoving their “beliefs” down everybody’s throats. These days, I get where they’re coming from. I think both groups I’ve defined above possess members that are arrogant and condescending in their comprehension of what basically amounts to philosophy 101. Their ability to refute the Kalam cosmological argument and call out Pascal’s wager for the logical fallacy that it is has given them a downright unhealthy sense of superiority, in many cases. I feel that this is especially prevalent with the folks that reduce everything to mathematics. They lost their appreciation for the question. They’ve fallen into the same narcissistic certainty that comes with being the most devout of biblical scholars.
This is where the suffocating grip of that nihilistic hopelessness can be loosened. This is where atheism can provide a far more optimistic view of the universe. The very fact that we don’t have all the answers is what can give us hope. There are so many things that we do “know” with near certainty, but the list of questions we don’t have answers for is fundamentally infinite. At least as infinite as the biblical description of God’s power and authority. So vast it is that we don’t even know what we don’t know. Every bit of presumed certainty we have is based on concepts that are as close to factual as they can be, but not technically absolute. This isn’t to say that we should entertain every absurd idea that some one brings to the table, of course, but actual answers are in truly short supply here. How on Earth can we pretend that there is no meaning to existence when we understand so goddamn little?
The question is greater than us all. It’s greater than the sum of our knowledge and understanding as it is. Somewhere along the line, so many atheists have forgotten that truth. They forgot how to utter the words “I don’t know.”
What does this mean for our conversation about death? Indeed, it still means that we have no logical reason to believe that we do anything other than cease to exist when we die. We might very well be wrong on that subject, and the hope that we are is something I’ll probably carry with me until my own demise, personally. As it stands, however, that’s the way it apparently is. That being said… even if that is the absolute truth of our frail lives, there is still – to me – a great sense of wonder and happiness to take away from this discussion. We might be finite, but we still have our passions, our questions, our love. We still find happiness and fulfillment from a range of both mundane and significant things. We laugh at Mel Brooks movies, cry for joy when we get the job we interviewed for, and give ourselves entirely to others under the power of irrational love.
(As far as we know), we exist in an incomprehensibly massive universe that existed for at least billions of years before us, and will apparently continue to exist for billions more after. And yet, here we are. Blips on the radar, to be sure, but here nonetheless. Here we are to love, laugh, cry, and wonder… Even if that experience is as finite as it seems to be, we are here at exactly the same time as the stuff that we find ourselves invested in. We are here at the same time as the ones we fall in love with. We are able to appreciate the sorrow associated with even imagining losing those things.
Yet what would happiness and fulfillment really be if we didn’t have that sorrow to stand it next to? The mere fact that we are able to exist and have those experiences is an absolute wonder all of its own.
agirlhasnoname. 