And so what comes next? What happened in my life of mediocre atheism? The first thing to explain is probably the fact that in addition to being a mediocre atheist I was not a terribly consistent one. I could really not decide if I was an atheist, an agnostic or a warmed over deist. As stated earlier the main loadstar in all of this was not being Christian. An odd thing that I found myself doing to keep up my non-Christian fervor was watching bad televangelists. There was one in particular whom I think was named Joel (but maybe they are all named Joel). He would sell what appeared to be handkerchiefs that he had prayed over, or sweated on or muffled a sneeze into (I can’t really remember) and with a significant gift to his ministry he would send you one of them. I never order one and was pretty sure my dad wouldn’t have thought it was funny if it showed up on my credit card statement.
Speaking of my parents they did something wonderful in this stage of my life – they left me alone. Not in the sense that they ignored me (even though I probably deserved it at times) but rather they let me think through my issues by myself, neither haranguing me nor harassing me about my new found lack of faith. It’s hard to describe this without quoting Sting who was quoting a cliché (if clichés can be quoted) when he talked about setting something free if we love them. I obviously cannot say how things would have turned out if my parents had acted like this tedious girl I went to high school with, who “evangelized” to me most of my senior year in English class culminating in drawing a giant cross in my yearbook surrounded by the types of saying that you find in Christian Book Store wall-hangings. I think I may have stayed an atheist a year or two longer just to spite her (which I assume is probably going to add some time to purgatory for me).
To drift into a slightly different topic for a minute I have sometimes pondered just how much bad evangelism has done for the world of atheism. There seems to be something about repelling being stronger than attraction. And this is why I said my parents were so wonderful in this because they simply let me know what they believed through living it. Not giving me banal slogans or pointing out the error of my ways, they simply went on being Christian and let me figure it out for never wavering from who they were.
Interestingly, or maybe not so interestingly my life in the atheism lane looked a lot like it did in the Christian lane, just with a little more smugness and condescension thrown in. There is always something satisfying for humans to believe themselves smarter and cleverer than everyone around them. I tended to do this but like I said I was not really all that different. My moral compass was basically Judeo-Christian whether or not I actually adhered to it.[1] I think for the most part I still adhered to what you to the sense of right and wrong on which I was raised. In other words I did not believe that there was something spiritual in violence like the Vikings or that I needed to sacrifice virgins to make sure that the sun rose in the morning. My behavior was not wonderful but the moral structure on which I came to understand as a Christian pretty much hung around. All which seems fairly typical. The professional atheist class tends to want to be thought of as good and decent people and they pretty much let good and decent be defined in the ways the Judeo Christian tradition has thought about it. Kind of how the non-religious still go Christmas shopping and decorate their lawns with inflatable snowmen. They may tell you they celebrate the secular part of Christmas but I am not sure they can be separated that neatly. It does however make me wonder what an atheism would look like if it became completely unmoored from this tradition.
So I graduated High School and went off to a Jesuit College, which is kind of the Roman Catholic version of being an atheist (I’m joking). Most of the kids were Roman and many tried to go to mass. I am sure that there were good and devout kids there who lived lives different from mine, but most of my friends did pretty much the same things I did just with a few religious trappings thrown in. That is the strange thing is how you can be a non-Christian and go to a school comprised largely of kids who had spent their entire life in Roman Catholic schooling and not see much difference in the day to day operation of your life and your interaction with other people. My atheism was a bit novel but not a whole lot more novel than being part Armenian or being a Formula 1 fan – not something you encounter every day but nothing that would provide any fodder for a zany, fish out of water made for TV movie. A few people challenged it but not terribly enthusiastically, and there were no real attempts at conversion. It may have been to the Catholic audience that being an atheist or being a protestant were largely seen as the same thing. I did actually go to mass once and promptly stuck out like the latent Protestant I was. Someone invited me and I thought I should go and be polite. The problem was I grew up understanding that if you went to church you wore at least a sport coat and tie. So I hurriedly put on a coat and tie only to find out that not only do Catholics not wear a tie to church they seem to dress like they are going out to see if they can unclog the septic system or tar their roof. I don’t think I ever went back.
In years since I have talked to militant Catholics who can’t fathom that I went to a Catholic school and didn’t come out the other end as a Catholic. The thinking seems to be almost like that of Origin and his doctrine of universal salvation. That over time the tractor beam like pull of the Catholic Church would be too much for me to me to resist and I would ultimately find myself basking in the glories that only Rome could provide. That did not happen although my atheistic militancy (or at least the attention seeking part of it) did seem to subside a little.
I think the main reason I found nothing attractive in Roman Catholicism was a class I took on the history of religion. It sounded interesting and was supposed to be a sort of survey of the religious instincts of humanity and how they were fulfilled across the years and across cultures, but unfortunately it was some false advertising. The course was taught by a sort of Zen-Jesuit who probably smoked too much pot in the 70’s. Part of the class’s requirement was to show up in the mission church on campus at 7:00 am every morning and practice Zen meditation somewhere near the high altar. We were to sit in some sort of yoga position and I’m not really sure what after that. My butt fell asleep after ten minutes or so of this and decided that since I was also pledging a Fraternity at the time a class with fewer early morning requirements might be a better fit. Even looking back now I am not sure what the point of this was. I assume the professor maybe had a Reses Peanut Butter Cup like epiphany and thought that by dropping Buddhism into Catholicism something magical would happen. And maybe if I had stuck around for more than a few weeks I might have obtained some deep insights into the world but probably not. At least not any deeper than the ones I obtained sitting around my fraternity house contemplating how long it would have taken Bugs Bunny to open all the little boxes that were contained in the million box. If that’s not the sound of one Jesuit clapping I don’t know what is.
I will finish with one last observation about my non-believing years which has to do with politics. Put rather briefly while I was an atheist/agnostic I was also pretty sure that I was a communist/socialist. I, of course, realize that these two phenomenon are not always linked but for me they were. I was sold on the whole opiate of the masses business. It was all one big conspiracy as far as I was concerned. I think in many ways my longing for centralization of the means of production also made me think that this was how everything really worked. There were powerful forces at work and those powerful forces could make the masses do what they wanted them to do, like Don Corleone explaining to Michael about the big shots pulling the strings. In many ways it made atheism much easier because it did not force me to try and understand it as an organic phenomenon. It answered the question of where did religion come from (from evil exploiters of the proletariat) and why did people believe it (because the same evil exploiters made them). It was a very nice and self-contained system. The masters of industry wanted to take everyone’s stuff but needed to provide a way to blind others of what they were actually doing so they cooked up religion, which told people to be content with what they had and thereby stay anesthetized from the truly villainous things going on around them. I think it was Peter Robinson who said that the 19th century allowed for atheism because Darwin told people were they came from, Freud told them why they felt guilty and Marx told them where they were going. You could certainly argue that this was simply replacing one religion with another and in many ways I think that is what I did. I had something of a secular religion. A religion that had rules, a tremendous amount of judgment and a paradise. Well the paradise bit may be a bit far flung if you spent much time in Eastern Europe during this time, but nonetheless it did make promises.
That is the thing with us, we never really stop being religious we may just do it with a different god, a god that society does not recognize as such so we can pretend that we are atheists. So when I say I was an atheist this probably is not really true. I had rejected the God of the Bible, but lots of people who are not atheists have done this, just ask the Buddhists. In the Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul says this to the Greeks, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” In this passage Paul makes a distinction that I am not sure we are capable of making today. He observes the religious nature of the Greeks even though they do not worship Jesus as the Messiah. Most of those who are atheist today would define it in terms of not believing in God or a higher power and if pushed a whole lot to explain what they mean by their definition of God or a higher power it would look very similar to the God of the Bible. An atheist would not tell you that they are an atheist because they don’t believe in Odin or Valhalla or the happy hunting ground. Most of their atheism would be defined in terms of not being Christian. And this may be the confusing thing when I said I was an atheist because really I had simply rejected the faith I was brought up in. But that seems to be the definition of atheist today because people don’t quite understand what religion is. It is sort of like a not very bright girl I went to high school with who told us that she was liberal because she didn’t have any conservative clothes. While this may be part of being liberal it certainly doesn’t make the whole argument. Not being Christian does not necessarily make someone an atheist.
Never having been someone besides myself I cannot speak to how others feel. Maybe there are things about which I am curious to which others pay no attention, but I think I am on fairly safe ground when I say a question that has preoccupied humanity for some time has been why. As in why are we here. The answer is pretty easy in the short term. I am here because of my parents, but the question is bigger than that. It ultimately gets back to the question of why is there anything at all, be it a rock or Shields and Yarnell. Science in many ways has grown more self-satisfied these days but it offers no answer to this question. The big bang posits….well a big bang. But it does not say how the thing that went bang got there in the first place. Some have tried but it generally amounts to little more than kicking the can a little further down the road. To my mind when you ask the question of why anything exists at all the answer must involve something putting it there. Or to quote Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music, “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.” This is a way we end up thinking ourselves towards an end. And it is not irrational to label this end a god or gods. The Deists labeled this god the unmoved mover. Something permanent moved to make what we call the universe. I don’t hate this argument, but I am not positive that it is air-tight. You can certainly get to the stage of saying that something had to bring forth the stuff that is here without necessarily concluding that this thing has to be a god. You can also punt on the answer by saying something to the effect that we don’t know yet. That is we are using God or the gods as a space holder for our lack of knowledge, something like Helios and his sun-chariot. And this is a valid argument to an extent. History is filled with examples of people inserting gods into the system when they do not understand something. The question with this however is whether or not the question is even a scientific one. Science tends to be associated with what is and so to ask why it is may not be a place where it would offer much in the terms of a worthwhile answer.
And while I hope this little divergence was not too dull, I do bring it for a reason and that reason is because the question of “why” has been one that floats through my brain in various times and places and, in my case, is at least part of the story for my return to religion in general. I don’t want to dwell too long on how I came back to being a Christian partly because it’s not terribly coherent. Again having never been someone else (that would be a different religion) I tend to be a bit skeptical when people give one reason for something happening. That is because in my experience when I have changed, moving from one understanding to another, there has never been one thing that caused it. And so I will briefly recount the events that made me reassess who I was and what I believed. And, first and foremost, why it never satisfactorily answered why. That is why some of my journey in the world of unbelief was spent as a Deist because of the fact that they at least took this question seriously. They fall down in some other aspects of being a fully formed religion, but they at least saw it as a question worth posing. And so this never completely went away and I never found much satisfaction in the answers that were provided in atheism or agnosticism. Scientists may assure us that they will eventually figure it out, but if I didn’t have faith in God, I’m not really sure it makes logical sense to have faith in Bill Nye. And this lack of satisfaction really became apparent when I was reading some Jacques Derrida in a Literary Criticism class. I had heard of him and from what I knew he seemed to be a sort of guru who would lead me to the promised land of what exactly I can’t remember, but it was going to be awesome.
I want to do my best in this to not reduce Derrida to a straw man. That is I don’t want to paint a caricature of him that I can then easily dismantle. So let me try to explain briefly what it was that I read and what it was that he seems to have wished to convey. The word that we tend to associate with Derrida is deconstructionism, which he sort of took from Heidegger (who went to my Alma Mater Freiburg University, but was also a Nazi). Derrida was not a Nazi, but more of a Marxist and had better hair than Heidegger. Some have said that you can’t even really define deconstructionism, but let me try. The basics are that language is pre-loaded with certain information that it has acquired over time and may not be conveying in a pure way what was originally intended. You can think of it like a boat hull gradually being covered with barnacles. So if 400 years ago someone said, “You have to be crazy if you think I’m going to pay that much for this lute.” We in interpreting it would have a whole lot of baggage tied to these words that came in the intervening 400 years that we cannot truly understand what the original speaker meant to convey. The idea then is basically to strip all of this away so that we can arrive at the true meaning. I have not read Derrida extensively but in what I have read it seems he spends a lot more time talking about doing this than he does in actually doing it, kind of how Hans and Franz never actually did any exercise. My issue however was not the dearth of any actual deconstructualizing (if that is a real word), it was that it seemed the whole system broke down on the fact that I was reading this in translation. Think of all the layers that were added on by my not only reading this many years after it was written but reading it in translation where a translator made any host of decisions about how to convey Derrida’s original meaning. So it seemed that what Derrida was pointing out, was not on terribly sound footing because how could I trust that I was receiving the information that he intended for me to receive in the first place. It seemed like a monster that ate itself.
And I guess upon realizing this it got me realizing that nothing was on that sure of footing. In other words the sort of deep intellectual purity that atheists demanded of religion was not even really there in their own systems of thought. If Derrida was supposed to be the pinnacle of non-religious thought (which many would debate, but in my mind at the time he was) how could he have all, if not more of the problems I had left Christianity over? And it was not an Archimedes in the bath like moment. I was not given clarity as to where I should be going, but it seemed to indicate that it would not be in the world of French deconstructionalism. I guess if I am going to be self referential this would be my sort of summer camp moment. A place where I knew something was wrong, but not yet sure what right looked like. So let’s get on with it and look at some other markers in my not so triumphant return to the faith.
[1] There has been much written to try and create a secular moral structure, that is a moral foundation that is not dependent on God or the gods. Much of it tends to be circular in its reasoning like the atheists who decided to plaster “be good for goodness sake” on the side of buses during the Christmas season. They really punted on defining “good” and were probably hoping that the rest of the world had some unexamined Judeo Christians definitions of good allowing them to make some sense out of such a pronouncement.