Because of Me, He’s an Atheist?

Filed Under people, questions, quotes, religion, spiritual practice | 7 Comments

My husband informed me that before we met, he was agnostic. But due to what he’s learned from me about religion over the last 2+ years, he’s now an atheist. Wow. And I thought he’d influenced me to be an atheist.

I’m not sure what to think about this. Apparently, his attitude about God-belief used to be one of “whatever.” He didn’t see God as something that could be proved or disproved, and therefore chalked it up as irrelevant. For me, God was always very important. So losing my faith in God as I understood it in my mid-20s was life-changing for me. Trying to “make sense” of the world as a post-believer, means I haven’t let go of religion, or even notions of God.

The best explanation of this I’ve heard yet was provided by Hubert Dreyfus, in his first Berkeley lecture on existentialism. Here is my transcription of what he says about why Camus isn’t an existentialist, according to his definition:

Camus says he isn’t. He says he’s a pagan. I think that’s right. That is - I think, all the existentialists are within the Judeo-Christian tradition … they are in opposition to a culture that has as one of its fundamental beliefs that there is a supreme being that makes everything intelligible, that gives moral law … and thanks to the supreme being, we can find out what to do and everything will make sense, and not be contradictory and so forth, and the culture lived off that for a long time …. we can call that absolute - this absolute source of meaning, absolute authority. You can count on it to make sense of the world, and make sense of your life.

Now Camus certainly denies there is any such Absolute … he’s definitely against the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, but he thinks that the way you should fix it is just get over the problem of seeking an absolute. So, reduce your demands … why should we think that there’s going to be THAT kind of answer, why should we need that kind of answer? Can’t we just appreciate the little things? Lie on the beach in Algeria as at the end of The Stranger, appreciate all the way the world is, even though you’re going to die … but … that’s a kind of pre-Christian attitude, that’s why he says he’s a pagan ….

Our culture has gotten addicted - Nietzsche would say, we’re sort of absolute junkies; that is, we’ve gotten so used to understanding everything in terms of a supreme being and creation and so forth, that you can’t just get over it. Camus’ idea is you just get over it, you stop expecting the kind of answer that we thought we had for 2000 years. And that’s pre-Christian as I say ….

[The existentialists (Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Heidegger)] - they all think that though it turns out there isn’t any such absolute, we have become defined in terms of the need for it; because once we thought we had it, and it gave us this amazing world in which everything made sense, and we knew what to do and we knew that virtue was rewarded and vice was punished …. But when Nietzsce says God is dead … unlike Camus … he thinks it is the most disastrous and frightening and terrible thing you could possibly experience and discover - because he’s not a pre-Christian or pagan, he’s a post-Christian, he’s somebody writing after we got hooked on this absolute supreme being.

The most serious thing we have to deal with is that the supreme being kind of absolute doesn’t exist anymore.

So if you’ve read that far (which I hope you did), that pretty much sums up where I’m at, and it also explains why Nietzsche, and writers inspired by Nietzsche have been so instrumental for me.

In our time together, I’ve managed to impress upon my now-husband the centrality of religion to many people’s lives, and now he seems genuinely alarmed. His eyes are opening to the ways people call on their faith to justify their lives, to sort themselves out, make even small daily decisions, rule nations, and so on. Now he sees religious belief as a threatening state of mind, whereas in the past he saw it as a mostly harmless personal matter.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. Did I unwittingly draw him away from a more innocent, pre-Christian attitude while I’ve been busy coping with the tear in my own religious fabric? And another question I have is what is the next step? I’m asking this of myself - what is my next “step” in belief about the nature of things. Am I going to continue to try to “make sense of the world?”

The conscious part of me says there is nothing to make sense of: The purpose of life is to find and make meaning. This is what I’ve learned from the writings of people who have lived through the horrors of war (particularly the Holocaust). When I isolate my thoughts to that, I feel a tremendous amount of peace. But the unconscious part of me is still grounded in an absolute mindset, this belief that somewhere, there is an answer, and that if I purify myself enough and educate myself enough I might be able to glimpse it with a mythical clarity - even for a moment.

I don’t know. Whatever happens for me, I now feel a greater sense of responsibility - knowing that whatever path I walk, my husband will be with me.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Feb

29

From Obama to Alpha Centauri

Filed Under anecdotes, capitalism, politics, religion, science | 1 Comment

My youngest brother started it. He prompted a conversation between me and the husband about imperialism, liberal interventionism, and the concept of universal human rights. From this, somehow we got to talking about the privileged position of faith and the contradictions that creates, how it’s strange to accept the “miracles” of Jesus based on the word people who didn’t understand much about how the natural world worked, and then magicians …. On to the God of Gaps, and the popular idea that when we die our “energy” lives on as a personal spirit, how long would it take to travel to Alpha Centauri, intelligent life on other planets wouldn’t need to be “humanoid,” and finally, the Prime Directive. Which led us right back to non interventionist vs interventionist politics.

This all began when my brother told me he’d send me his copy of Obama’s Audacity of Hope (he’s read both of Obama’s books), and wanted me to pay special attention to the chapter “Beyond Our Borders” (or something along those lines). “And then tell me if you think Obama is an imperialist.”

Two hours later I was sitting here thinking about the fact that when I look into the Milky Way I’m looking years into the past. Even the sun is always ten minutes old to my eyes. And many “primitive” people saw themselves as “the people” in the same way that some religions advocate humans as special to God. We are thriving and striving in a narrow and delicate slip of our planet. I want the primacy of a ripe orange in my hand and an understanding of magnitude.

Taken one by one, we are minor things repetitively criss-crossing the streets of the towns we live in, but as a whole we’ve constructed elaborate universes of knowledge, some real, some imagined.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Nov

4

Brights’ Responses to “I’ll Pray For You”

Filed Under religion | 2 Comments

Peacebang recently wrote a post about an advice columnist’s suggestion to a reader who didn’t want a co-worker praying for her.

My comment to PB’s entry was that it didn’t offend me if people pray for me. I pray for others, in the sense that I intentionally focus on them, e.g. “hold them in my thoughts.” What I don’t do is beseech a higher power on their behalf.

There was a controversial clergyman (I cannot remember his name, but I think he was from New Jersey?) I saw once on television, and he told a quick story about a family member becoming very sick, and all of these people told him they were praying for her. He said he had to ask himself, Would God really make my loved one heal because all of these people happen to know me and can pray for her? Would God not heal her if I wasn’t as well-known, or if fewer people prayed for her?

At The Brights’ Net, there is a posting on this very subject. I think the responses to “what to say when someone says ‘I’ll Pray For You’” are a fair representation of how the average atheist would react.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Sep

5

Sin of Being Human

Filed Under questions, religion, uu culture | 5 Comments

After reading Shelby’s post on Rev. T.D. Jakes’ advice to congregations about domestic violence, I replied that I’d never seen that issue raised within a UU congregation. Maybe about some other people, out there somewhere, but basically I’ve been left with the impression that domestic violence doesn’t exist within UU communities. Is this true? I doubt it. UUs have all sorts of problems, why wouldn’t we have that one? And yet, I can’t think of a single incident in my six or so years as a UU in which domestic violence was treated as our problem.

Peripherally, I’ve been hearing about this Larry Craig Senator guy and his fall from “grace.” And yes, a lot of left leaning folks are quick to call out his hypocrisy, while baffled that the right makes excuses for him. I want to say to the Lefties: For crying out loud, don’t you get where these people are coming from? Many of them believe that it is inevitable to be sinful - we can’t help it as humans - but we have to admit that it’s a sin. The great crime isn’t in succumbing to temptations, but in being rebellious to God’s laws.

This is how you can end up with such wonderful rationalizations as the one told to me yesterday by a new friend: upon hearing that she was moving in with her boyfriend, her devout young Catholic friends chastised her; when she pointed to their child born out of wedlock as an example of them being hypocritical, their defense was, “Well, yes, we had sex outside of marriage, but at least we didn’t use birth control!”

If UUs were perfect, that might explain our small numbers. But we all know that’s not the case.

When I hear about the crazy-ass shenanigans of some of my Christian friends’ church lives, it makes me go Wow! How is that even possible? Adultery, alcoholism, domestic abuse, embezzlement, trickery and gossip-mongering - all kinds of things that may have precedence in the Bible, but are certainly not generally considered moral - and it dawns on me: it doesn’t matter. Maybe to the individual person here and there, but it doesn’t matter on a bigger scale: people expect this. Religious communities are like big families, and “dysfunction” is - in a way - embraced as proof of our inability to live without God’s grace.

But in a community that doesn’t necessarily believe in God’s grace or in the human being’s hopeless imperfections, what do they make of a parishioner who beats their partner or child? How do we minister - if at all - to that person? As a non minister, I have no idea. But shouldn’t I, as a lay person? As a church-goer? We try to protect the innocent, but what to do about the guilty person? And aren’t we all guilty of something?

Popularity: 18% [?]

Aug

16

What Does the Bible Say About Family?

Filed Under quotes, religion | 5 Comments

After reading at Making Chutney that a Baptist seminary was offering an undergraduate concentration of Homemaking for women only, I thought about this last quote of the article:

“We are moving against the tide in order to establish family and gender roles as described in God’s word for the home and the family,” Patterson said at the meeting, according to Parham. “If we do not do something to salvage the future of the home, both our denomination and our nation will be destroyed.”

What does the Bible say about family?

Popularity: 25% [?]