It's been a long time. I've either had nothing to say, or no time to say it... I'm not even sure I'm "back." But a recent conversation with a friend had me reflecting on this, and I reflect best in writing...
Here's a question I get: are you really an atheist?
It usually comes up after I've used Christian imagery in a class discussion to illustrate something (say, the difference between a cross as symbol or artifact) and I want to assure the students that such references are not an underhanded way to proselytize. (For some reason this is important to me, probably because I once had an annoying statistics teacher who saw himself as a Christian stand-up comic and took every opportunity to turn a statistics problem into an opportunity to preach to us. Overreacting? Sure. But I don't ever want to be seen as that guy...).
But that's not the only time. It comes up when someone has had too much to drink at a party and wants to talk religion; or when I empathize with a friend who's had some particularly bad luck, and my advice is decidedly pragmatic; or when I'm asked to agree with some benignly magical view of the universe. And just the other day, a friend and I were comparing and contrasting our pasts and presents, marveling at common themes.... In my case, that contrast between past and present is virtually structured on my shift from evangelical Christian to atheist.
Yes, I really am an atheist. Most of the time, I don't care. And you probably shouldn't, either.
First, let me get the argument about semantics out of the the way. Some of my students delight in trying to maneuver me into saying that, since I can't possibly be so arrogant as to pretend my beliefs are infallible, I should actually call myself an agnostic. Fine.
Nevertheless, I still call myself an atheist. Think of it as an analogue to my Christian days: back then, I would have had the arrogance to hold that my beliefs were infallible — yet, in those inevitable moments when I struggled with doubt (as do most thinking Christians), I didn't suddenly call myself an agnostic. I still believed, even with doubts. I was still a Christian.
Similarly, an admission of fallibility isn't enough to make the shift from atheist to agnostic.
As is often the case, there's a psychological reason, too: for a long time I did use the label "agnostic" to avoid admitting to myself that I had, in fact, rejected my past beliefs. Those were deeply uncomfortable times. (In fact, they remain so, to some extent; I still have an involuntary tightening in the stomach when someone makes a joke at Jesus' expense.) Letting go of the past — in any number of ways — isn't as easy as I'd like it to be; calling myself "atheist" is thus a way of letting go.
Of course, invoking the word "belief" almost inevitably raises a further objection: that atheism is as much a religion as, say, Christianity or Islam. I'll admit that, with some atheists, it looks like that, even to me. I have a friend (a former student), for example, whom I call an "evangelical atheist" because, in the novel he's writing, he often sneaks in off-handed references to atheism. It's the same strategy I used when I wrote lyrics for my Christian band. More amusingly, it's the same thing he criticizes Stephanie Meyer for doing with her Mormon worldview in Twilight. (If he reads this, he'll know who he is, and that last comparison will annoy him to no end. Heh. [Update: It got his goat, but he also informs me he's changed.])
But I don't see atheism as a religion. It's not an affirmative belief; I'm not claiming to believe in something. It's not codified; I have no atheist text that I point to as my bible (not even Origin of Species). I have no rituals. Atheism doesn't explain much about how the world works, at least not for me; indeed, I spend a lot of time noticing all the things I don't know, and that I don't expect ever to be able to explain.
More important, perhaps, my identity is not tied up with my atheism. I don't feel any camaraderie with other atheists, at least not as atheists; I feel no thrill of recognition or gratitude when I learn that someone else believes (or, more precisely, doesn't believe) the same as I do — as I did when, as a Christian, I stumbled upon another Christian in a classroom, or at a conference, or wherever.
And guess what? I don't even want you to become an atheist.
Back when I was a Christian, I would have seen the way I am now as some mixture of pathetic — how does one get up in the morning with no meaning, nothing to live for? — and scary — how would the world survive without morals grounded in God, or at least in something beyond the petty interests of humans, beyond the merely material? Indeed, I've been asked these questions directly, but I also think they're behind that first question I mentioned: "Are you really an atheist?"
And since I've been asked this quite a lot over the past year, I figured there might actually be some interest in an answer. (Thus this blog post...)
So: how do I get up in the morning with no meaning, with nothing to live for?
The short, kind of smart-ass answer is that it just kind of happens; the alarm goes off, and I get out of bed and do the things I do: make some coffee, write 1000 words in a journal, put away the dishes, get the kids ready for school....
The longer answer is more complicated: Meaning, such as I find it, lies within the things I do, and in the value I place on doing them. Sure, it's not always easy; sometimes I feel like my journal is a waste of words; sometimes I hate the dishes; sometimes the kids are too loud, or too contentious, or too uncooperative, and the point of it all escapes me. (Coffee, however, is constant.)
But in the end, I value these things, and they take on the meaning I give them. That's enough for me.
This is not to say I believe in "free will." While I operate on the premise that the meaning of a thing rests in my interpretation of it, I don't delude myself into thinking this interpretation is simply my choice. For one thing, I can't make myself interpret things in a way that doesn't make sense to me (I know this because I've tried). I can't, for example, simply decide that Christianity works as a touchstone for me. Nor can I make myself believe the the types of things that so many others — friends of mine; indeed, smart friends of mine — find comfort in: that when God closes a door, he opens a window; or that my father is in a better place; or that such-and-such happened because the Universe wants to teach me something....
No. If I'm a believer in anything, it's in something like the concept of overdetermination — a concept I learned back in my critical theory days, which argues that a subject (in this case, moi) is a function of complex interactions among multiple, even competing determinants. And while "exercising my free will" may be one of the things that feeds into my interpretation of the world, or of my experience of the world, it's only one thing. There are many, many others--the way I was raised, including the religious background I now no longer accept; the experiences I've had; the way I've been socialized into, for example, the profession of teaching; the way society sees me and what I believe... All these things, and many more I could list — and many more I could not list because I am not even aware of them — go into a blender and spit out the beliefs and values that make up me.
Many have told me this sounds "hopeless" to them — hopeless is indeed the term I've heard from many who've challenged me on my position. And maybe it is. But I prefer it, at least, to a belief system based on hope in a jealous God whose "grace" saves me from a literally hellish anger at human fallibility, or in a Universe that vibrates in sympathy with my thoughts (the "law of attraction"), or....
So why should you care?
Aside from my family — Christians with a personal and, likely, painful fear for my soul — I'd argue that you probably shouldn't care.
Especially in my case: I'm not strong enough to be a Nietzsche, nor witty enough to be a Wilde, nor smart enough to be a Hitchens. As atheists go, I'm relatively harmless; I'm not going to bring the country down in nihilistic flames. Truth is, I don't like hurting people, and I don't like being hurt, so I teach (just one vector in my students' overdetermined lives) values of diversity, tolerance, acceptance... and I do it without appealing to a transcendent morality, or a fear of God, or a belief in Hell, or the expectation of karma, or the sympathy of a vibrating universe.
All these seem to me to be a form of magical bullying.
Many of my students hear me say this and accuse me of inconsistency. How can I be ethical with no transcendent ground for ethics? It's hypocritical. But I don't mind. I say everyone is a hypocrite, to some extent.
But I like my hypocrisy better than most.