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
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