I stand with Gandhi. ”I love Jesus, it’s just his followers that I’m worried about.” How someone who’s core message was love could possibly inspire the wanton slaughter and worse of untold numbers of people throughout history is beyond me (of course this isn’t his entire legacy). But then I remember that we’re human: we’re the types of people that need to drop nuclear bombs on other people (twice! and counting) to learn that dropping nuclear bombs on people is bad and wrong. You never know until you try!
The take away I suppose, besides the quasi-depraved state of human nature, is that good things, maybe even the best things can be corrupted. I mean, you can drink too much water and drown yourself, for God’s sake.
Should we be worried about Love then? Well, It is generally accepted as the most potent force in the entire universe, which subtly implies an absolutely terrifying conclusion about it’s complimentary opposite It’s an oft referenced (but possibly apocryphal) statistic that you’re most likely to be murdered by someone that you know. Love when it becomes twisted can kill.
Jesus please forgive us.
A notable exception to this intimate death dealing is being INSPIRED by something like a religious or political ideology, or even national or ethnic identity. Once you swallow one or more of those pills then you’re primed and ready to kill just about anyone. We really are sorry Jesus. We have fucked up big time.
Hmm, yes, back to INSPIRATION though, another deadly substance when placed in the wrong hands. Regardless it’s a scarce resource in this morally bankrupt and barren wasteland of a culture, but I need some. I‘m an ex-mormon, recovering atheist, and now reluctant mystic, for lack of a better word (after my atheism metastasised into nihilism). Having circumnavigated practically the entire gamut of belief and non-belief I have it on good authority (my own lived experience lol) that the external world is not enough to keep me motivated.
Please allow me to explain… In spite of my dear new age friends’ constant and well meaning refrain ”to live in the moment,” a trite aphorism that no doubt has great utility. Still its stated conclusion contradicts my own (we here are hopefully getting used to paradoxes by now). But to quickly follow that train of thought through to its logical conclusion: when we strip away all extraneous imaginings, all we’re left with is what’s happening right now. And it is always now. That’s all there ever is or could be in this conception. Ah yes, well played you fucking hippies, but let’s not forget to culturally appropriate another very important aspect of the religions from the far east: “I am not my body.”
Our ancestors, once they exceeded a certain cognitive threshold, began performing rituals to mourn their dead, conjuring worlds beyond our own where we might transcend this mortal coil and continue somehow to exist. Elaborate theologies developed positing cosmic ethical codes of conduct woven into the very fabric of the universe. These systems set up for us a metaphysical carrot dangling just a little beyond the here and now (or a lot depending on your thoughts about death). And so appropriately, it has been said “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?”
And now I come to the penultimate point (Thank you for listening). Sometimes it takes a little while to get there, which is in fact: the point. As morality evolved, religion branched off into philosophy and the Greeks gave us a concept that we now call “telos”. This simply means a purpose, an object or state of being that we aim to achieve (but its application isn’t limited strictly to humans).
Although it took 100 thousand years to foramalise, this idea of telos is a close cousin of what we might broadly refer to as “narrative”, which is at least as old as language itself. Stories are at the very core of our human experience… And just a quick sidenote: what isthe telos of our stories, pray tell? Well, they carry a greater burden than poor Atlas himself, performing that most super human of tasks: they help us to make sense of the world.
Stories then, are not meant to remain on the page or to be passively heard but are intended as facimilies for living. They serve as inspiration (there’s that word again) which literally means breath, a vital element without which life is not remotely possible. Author of this realm, whoever you are, fill my lungs. Show me how to live.
And now we return to Jesus Christ, the Lord himself. Say what you will about the Christian narrative and I’ve perhaps been less than charitable in my interpretation thus far, but we can’t ignore the fact that it’s been with us for a couple of millennia now, so it must have something going for it. And although I find the idea of an innocent human(/God) sacrifice and resurrection to be logically incoherent, morally dubious and not to mention physically impossible, at best, still you have to admit that it’s one hell of a story.
As I alluded to, we live in a culture devoid of meaning and purpose. This is a byproduct of the modern and postmodern conditions. All our Grand Narratives-stories that structure society-have apparently collapsed. But you can’t keep a good saviour down-he has a funny habit of resurrecting doesn’t he? The second coming may not be as glorious or fiery (thank God) as advertised, but regardless Christianity is back from the dead, for a little while longer.
The zeitgeist is shifting. And maybe that’s because the best that modernity has to offer by way of an alternative to these spirtually vitalising Stories of Old, in the west at least, is the paradigm of materialism. It’s different strands: economic—he who dies with the most toys wins; and ontological—there is only physical stuff (nothing else actually exists); both point to the same moribund conclusion, you don’t matter; only matter matters and even the games that we make up to keep us busy, while we don’t matter, unsurprisingly have very little consequence in the grand scheme of things.
Thus if we were to scale say Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, wouldn’t the view from the summit reveal that an ideology based solely on physical stuff could only hope to meet the most basic necessities, found at the bottom of the pyramid? On a podcast, I’ve listened to, that I’m trying very hard to remember the name of, they discussed the trend of westerners converting to Islam and joining the Taliban, a little while back. The interlocutors understood the appeal: Why stack grocery shelves at woolies when you can participate in a conflict that will determine the existential fate of the world?
Appeals to conceit like these, are a common charge levelled against religion by my ex-fellow atheists: nothing but a thinly veiled cacoon to protect the ego from the horrifying reality of its own impermanence. And although that’s a fair criticism the corollary is undeniably admitting the psychological benefit that religion provides. I’m not just an automaton, consisting of atoms, posing as a bipedal hairless ape, in an accidental universe. No, with God I have purpose, a telos, a story that’s worth living and dying for.
“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship” said David Foster Wallace. Atheism is an absence of belief, and as the modern world has shown us, when god is dead that vacuum will be filled by something, whether it be money, fame, cheap dopamine, hopeless addictions or ridiculous ideologies and none of them can live up to the billing of The Real Top G (as mysterious and incoherent as he might seem).
And now we come to the greater point… I must chose what the fuck I’m going to do. I feel it’s beyond time to break my self imposed impasse when it comes to the question of God and take perhaps a Kierkegaardian leap. Sometimes the middle way can stop you from exploring more interesting paths. Don’t worry I’m aware of the risks. As I’ve detailed, even a message of love can be poisoned. Richard Feynman warned us: “To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell.” I’m absolutely terrified and ready for what I’m about to open up.
As Siddhartha sat under the Bodhi tree just before he attained enlightenment, all his demons attacked him at once. I feel their irresistible pull already. But I’m not sure if it’s wise to compare myself to the Buddha :). I may not fair as well as he did. Regardless, Logic screams out that this is all madness. In spite of my behaviours sometimes suggesting otherwise, I’ve always held reason in high regard. A return to a personal god after such a lengthy hiatus would be anathema to any kind of modern notion of progress. Ok, well, let me help you my rational self to exorcise those demons…
Even if I live in an objective universe (and that’s not a given), the primary aspect of my existence unequivocally is subjective. I literally cannot experience anything without this subjective faculty. Thus I grant consciousness primacy over all other facts, because without it there is nothing else. So if a subjective truth (i.e. that God exists) can help me to objectively live better, wouldn’t it make sense to adopt that view?
YES.
And so it is that I have decided to act as if, to live as if, God exists; but not just because it makes sense on some level, or because I’m having a dark night of the soul aka a midlife crisis, or because I’m dying, or because I’ve got nothing else better to do, although all of those factors have some bearing on my decision; The core reason why I’m doing it is because I choose to, because I want to, and most importantly because it feels right. I want to feel alive, I want to reach for an ideal so great that I might not be able to grasp it. That’s the kind of story that I want to live, a telos of significance.
Now all that’s left is to figure who or what God is… To be continued