God

I am, or am attempting to be, a thoroughgoing atheist. Thus, I not only don’t believe in God, but also other things that I take to be derivatives of believing in God, such as believing that things always work out for the best, and that there are objective rights and wrongs (and maybe hellfire awaits if someone does the wrong), and, ultimately, that there is any kind of absolute truth, which is to say, truth as it is normally conceived. (If I am consistent, that must apply as well to all of my assertions herein.) 

My reasoning is pragmatic. I have simply ceased to find it useful to speak of God and morality and even truth. In fact I find doing so to be counterproductive, as it leads to unnecessary confusion and strife.

So I now prefer to think exclusively in terms of a natural world of cause and effect, including a psychological world of beliefs, desires, and feelings. Admittedly this can leave some gaping holes in one's soul, but to me that seems the price to pay for being rational, which is apparently my highest value (or one of the highest).

            But one crucial qualification is that it must be clear what I mean by “God” and the other terms. For there are some things one might mean by any of these words that I certainly do believe in. For example, if one means by “God” that the universe will forever remain mysterious to human beings, I could not agree more. 

But I take the everyday meaning of “God” to be almost the exact opposite of that – a resolution of the mystery. For the everyday God is the Creator of the universe and all of its attributes, whereas for me part of the mystery is precisely how it is that this universe came to exist or even whether it did or might instead have always existed, which would be equally in need of an explanation. So I do not believe in God in that sense. 

And I positively rule out the existence of a God who is all-good, if God is at the same time supposed to be all-knowing and all-powerful, since that is incompatible with the horrors of the world.    

            However, I now realize there is a very big caveat to my disbelief … even in a perfect God. And I am not referring to the “easy out” of my one day going mad and coming to believe in God in that way. No, I mean I might come to believe in a perfect God even while still possessed of my sanity – at least in the non-question-begging sense of continuing to be rational in all the normal ways exclusively of this belief in God. (I think of someone like Francis Collins, director of the NIH, who is clearly a sane human being despite his, seemingly to me, wacky belief in Jesus Christ.) 

            This revelation came about in discussion with a friend who is a believer, who told me about her experience of discovering God. She said that one day while in church, which on that occasion she was attending in a fairly indifferent way for social reasons, she came to experience an emptiness inside herself becoming filled, and all the burden of certain guilt feelings she had carried all her life being lifted from her shoulders. And these two alterations have remained with her ever since -- for 20 years, without even an instance of dissipation. This she calls God. 

            I have read about experiences similar to that in the context of mysticism – usually there combined with a sense of oneness with the universe. I used to pursue that avidly, but, alas, never achieved it (even though I meditate every morning to this day, going on half a century). I asked my believing friend if she could accept the possibility of an atheist, as well as a Muslim or a Buddhist or whoever (she identifying as a Christian), having the same sort of experience as she. She readily agreed that this could certainly happen. 

            This was all music to my ears, and has even revived my aspiration to attain such a state someday … although my impression is that it is pretty much random who gets to do so, since a fervent aspirant – e.g., Mother Theresa -- may never do so (or may lose it), and a complete skeptic – e.g., Saul on the road to Damascus – can be zapped. 

            So my takeaway from this is that not only could I thereby become a believer, but that in a sense I already am, in that I believe such an experience is possible, even for myself, and I would welcome it, even from my present perspective. 

But note, as my friend agreed, that I certainly need not thereby come to believe in any particular religious doctrine. I imagine that a person might experience or interpret the changes in ways that many of us would even consider baneful, analogous to a bad drug trip or coming to believe that one’s mission was to be a scourge to the infidels. 

And I for one might continue to be fully secular, even materialist in my worldview; thus, I might interpret what had occurred as a peculiar neurological happenstance in or restructuring of my brain, having no further metaphysical significance. It could nevertheless utterly transform my feelings about life and myself. I can point to a minor analogue in my experience: the disappearance of “butterflies” in my belly when facing something that would normally make me fearful or anxious. I attribute this to my 50 years of yogic meditating and conceive it as a purely physiological change. But it has improved my life and made me better able to face certain challenges. All I have to do is redirect my attention (this skill being another consequence of the meditating) away from a fear-making thought – such as that I am about to speak to a large audience – since I don’t also have to contend with my body acting up. (Thus, note interestingly, the bodily response is not the emotion itself; I am still anxious without the butterflies. But the physiological upset can exacerbate the discomfort and disrupting influence of the emotion.)

            However, it is not only the possibility of purely physiological changes for the better that support the thesis that religious belief is not necessary for “salvation,” but also wholly nonreligious ideas that can profoundly improve one’s well-being. Here again I point to personal experience. After reading Reasons and Persons, a book of analytic philosophy by Derek Parfit, I suddenly lost any fear of ceasing to exist. I am now “ready to go” at any time. The simple story is that I no longer see any difference between going to sleep and dying (assuming an equally pain-free experience), since when somebody awakens, it is a matter of complete indifference, even to the person waking up, whether they are the “same person” who went to sleep or else are an identical clone with the complete set of (now problematically false) memories etc. of the person who went to sleep and was then. let us suppose, physically demolished, Thus, for the person who goes to sleep, life is for all practical purposes “over” forever. Just so, death. So what’s the problem? 

            May I not therefore rationally accept the possibility that one day, for whatever natural (i.e., not supernatural) reason – whether a physiological change or a novel thought -- , I will experience deep and lasting relief from a lifelong torment of the (material) soul, and without being convinced of any supernatural doctrine or occurrence (a literal miracle) or, for that matter, any implausible empirical or ideological or moralistic thesis?

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