Four Faiths Fractured (Part One)

 

The very stupidest piece of common wisdom regarding religion is a hard pick to make. There are many worthy contenders. For my money, “there are no atheists in foxholes” may be the winner. 

The contention is that, in times of mortal peril or strain, even snobbish intellectuals must resort to a bone-deep belief in god(s) whom they would normally deny. “Sure,” this pearl of wisdom sneers, “you might think with your big old brain, but how about when I / the State / a foreign army beats the shit out of you and scares you witless? How smart are you then, Einstein?” If you think that I’m being too harsh, contemplate why this expression employs “foxholes.” Why not say that there are no unemployed atheists, or no atheists who are behind deadline, or no starving atheists? Easy. It’s because the traumatic violence implied by “foxhole” is central to the threat buried in the expression.

 

Some no doubt will turn to god(s) in times of crisis. Much more frequently than they cure snobs of atheism, however, foxholes forge atheists. The body of literature on the religious crises that followed the First World War, the detonation of the first atomic bombs, and the other uncounted horrors of the twentieth century (not to mention the horrors of the twenty-first) does not speak highly of religion’s innate ability to help people through a crisis, though there are always perspectives cherry-picked for their value to the theist cause.

 

Let me tell you a story about atheists and foxholes.

 

NOT Fallout: New Vegas - possibly one of the blasts my grandfather was a test subject for

My maternal grandfather, who died a few years ago, spent a career in the military before retiring. He served in the Second World War in the Pacific theater. He served in Korea. He served in Vietnam. Throughout the entirety of his storied career, which involved both time as a paratrooper and as a test subject for live Army tests of atomic explosions in Nevada (a true and terrifying story), he was a staunch atheist. Not a tepid agnostic; he was more of a New Atheist in the mold of Richard Dawkins. Keep in mind that he publicly and unapologetically took this stance in the 1940s. Throughout my grandfather’s long life, the separation of church and state was the single political issue about which he cared the most.

 

I would think about my grandfather, atheism, and foxholes quite a bit in later years. I was raised devoutly Catholic and held to that faith throughout my youth, which was spent in a town that was crushingly, overwhelmingly, aggressively Mormon. I was young for my grade and not particularly cool (shocking, I know), and faith in God was a way I sought, and sometimes found, solace. I still remember managing my social anxiety before I knew there was such a diagnosis before the first day of middle school by obsessively repeating Desiderata to myself. Throughout grade school and into my early middle school years, I attended Catholic Sunday school each Sunday, served as an altar boy, and was eventually confirmed.

 

St. Olaf's Catholic Church in Bountiful, Utah

A friend of mine was raised without any religion at all. Her parents were professors, and her disconnection from the ambient theology of America has always seemed remarkable to me. She wasn’t even familiar with the essentials of the Jesus story until she was in her 30s. When I learned this, I wondered briefly if my personal belief system(s) might be different had I been raised without the idea of God. It’s impossible to tell, but I find it hard to believe that I would be the same lovable soul without the religious trauma that helped shape me. God, sin, capital-e Evil, hell; the whole horrible nine yards of Catholicism was folded into my mental material early. At the time, that grim theology seemed like a tremendous comfort, and of late, I’ve wondered why. Throughout my life, through both theism and nontheism, I’ve never understood people for whom religion is “no big deal,” or “something they don’t think about.” Casual atheism strikes me as ludicrous, as does casual theism. Why is this the case, though? Why do I consider religion such an important question?

 

To start with, the questions that underpin religious truths or lies apply to more than just theology. I agree with theists on one important point: faith is more than mere belief without proof. It’s a property of the human mind as vital to our sane survival as it is illusory, irrational, destructive, and poisonous. It is a trait that we can’t live without, but which amounts to the denial of reality on the grounds that it is simply too hard to accept the unspeakable vacancy of existence. Faith is not a phenomenon limited to religion, although it is often relegated to that category with vague scorn. Those who do so – whether they have faith in human progress, Marxism, liberal democracy, or “a better tomorrow” through continued scientific innovation – might do well to pause and examine their own belief systems for faith. They may be surprised to find how much they have in common with theists, since all ideologies, including those I just listed, rest upon the irreplaceable load-bearing column of faith.

 

God was my first loss of faith, but it wasn’t my last. In the case of the non/existence of an omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent deity, what did me in was the ancient unsquarable circle of suffering. Christianity is a uniquely morbid and hateful faith to be brought up in (though every faith or ideology is hateful in its own unique way). I say this because it lays the entire sodden, shrieking meat-load of human suffering at humanity’s own feet and chalks it up to “immorality.” It quite literally claims that suffering is a result of an ancient, unforgivable sin, not to mention the uncountable sins we accumulate by acting the way that human beings are biologically programmed to act. Entire libraries of apologia have been written regarding the questions of “evil” and suffering, and while I won’t claim to have read them all (even a doctor of theology couldn’t credibly make such a boast), I’ve read my Aquinas, my Augustine, and even my John Paul II.

 

In the end, however, pulling on the thread of evil revealed a new, more important question. The question was not whether God would forgive me my sins: it was whether I could or would forgive God His. My faith began to unravel with the expansion of my base of knowledge about the conditions of human existence in the broader world beyond my own small circle of suffering. I’ve been a Tyle I Diabetic since I was two years old and, as a result, my own suffering was not small. It was personal, though, and thus it was easier to plumb the depths of my own behavior in search of that which might justify the pain, the fear, the seizures, the whole horrible gift basket handed to some humans to celebrate the occasion of their birth. I had no illusions that I had it worse than anyone in particular, but as I began to comprehend the depth of atrocity and unmitigated pain that forms the base strata of all life (not just human life), two explanations appeared plausible.

 

The first explanation was that there was a God, and that, in the succinct formulation offered by Slayer, “God hates us all.” This is a perspective known as dystheism, and includes characterizations of God or the gods as evil, incompetent, negligent, or otherwise dedicated to ends other than capital-g Good. The second possibility was that there was, in fact, no god or gods. It did not take me long to discard the first possibility, which seemed like a paranoid’s delusion or something out of H.P. Lovecraft. When I realized that belief in an evil God was absurd, I realized that the converse was also true; to wit, the perspective that “it’s all part of God’s plan” or that “everything happens for a reason” is just as delusional.

 

The difference between the Happy God delusion and the Monster God delusion, as any psychologist will tell you, is in the social acceptability and utility of the delusion.

 

Nontheism is only one portion of this strand of faithlessness, if one wishes to remain true to one’s reason and principles. There are any number of people who don’t posit a deity, per se, but believe in similarly comforting, similarly immaterial things like karma, reincarnation, astral projection, or other “paranormal” phenomenon. Real, rock-bottom-truth rationality lends one to a perspective stricter than nontheism; the point of view known as materialism, which holds that reality is that which can be measured and observed. This perspective precludes the idea that our reality is merely an illusion, a hateful veil of tears through which we must pass on our way to a better, realer reality*. World-as-hateful-illusion is an interesting form of faith, one which doesn’t dispute the horrors of reality so much as acknowledge them as the work of a malign but not all-powerful force (the demiurge in some Gnostic Christian and Neoplatonic traditions; Mara in Buddhism; Satan as “the god of this world” in Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians).

 

Representation of the demiurge

For me, the death of God didn’t really hit home for some time. I was among those whom I now call “glib atheists” for a long time; throughout my teen years and into my early twenties, in fact. Like most people, I dealt with the harsh realities of a godless universe in the easiest way imaginable: I did whatever I could not to think about it. Once I did begin to think about it, I couldn’t seem to stop. With no God to guide events or the conduct of humanity, we were simply another half-bright species temporarily infesting a rock in the midst of a universe so vast and uncaring that to fully comprehend it is to undergo what psychiatric professionals would call dissociation.

“All right,” I told myself when I could wriggle on the end of the hook no longer. “There is and never has been a god or gods, nor the reassurance of a divine or transcendent plan or plane. Moving forward, any truths must account for a godless cosmos governed by chance and natural law, in which we are who and what we are due to evolution and the environment in which our species rose to sapience.”

 

“But,” I argued at that stage in the death of my faith(s), “we are humankind; we are the gods of this cosmos. If we put our minds and hearts to good use, surely we can claim the stars one day, or at least improve our lot on this planet significantly.” In other words, there were other fires by which I could still warm myself in the frozen darkness of a godless universe. There was, in a word, ideology.

 

At least, for a while.

 

CONTINUED IN PART TWO