Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part two

One of the books I was reading during my transition from fundamentalism into agnosticism in 2005 was Rabbi Kushner’s Who Needs God. This was exactly the question I was asking myself, and Kushner’s writing was clear and simple, so this was the perfect time to read his book. I did not need any complex theology.

I wanted to enjoy wisdom. Wisdom, I wrote in my journal, is the only pleasure worth having. One can get enough of sex, but not of wisdom, as King Solomon the sex fiend discovered with his thousand wives and concubines. And because of wisdom, every day, no matter how tired I was during my medical problems, I had a deep sense of awe, as if the whole universe were awash in holiness. Maybe it was just an altered mental state, but if so, it was a state of happiness. I had come to doubt that there was a God of love, but I wanted to live as if there was a God of love.

At the same time, I was really angry at any God who might possibly exist. Kushner asked, how can you be angry at a God you do not believe exists? But I was angry at the fact that there should be a God who, just once, rescues the world from its misery. I could not come to terms with the fact that were was not.

This entry, from 9 January 2005 and subsequent days, is transcribed almost verbatim from my journal. I might note that I wrote in huge paragraphs, which I have here broken up and, in some cases, rearranged. I have added minimal comments, in brackets.

“I begin now to read Kushner’s Who Needs God. I need a break from ancient scripture which I read, first in devotion, then wisdom, then analysis; for example, I recognized Jeremiah’s manic-depressive extremes. I need to escape not from scripture so much as from a tyranny of how humans have used it.

“God challenged Job, asking if he had measured the earth, sky, and sea and knew everything in them. Now, we have done this. We cannot any longer identify God with what we do not know. Or can we? We calculate unknowable dimensions, as if the mere calculation of them makes us their masters.

“I admit that while I was wrong about much traditional doctrine, a mystery remains to which I must be open. Kushner said scientific research is an act of religious devotion, honoring the creator of mind. I use what I write as a religious gift, not as a challenge or a reason to be cynical. Cynical means “like dogs,” happy or angry from merely immediate circumstances. I need to focus on how my work of teaching and writing are my service to God, to lay claim again on the joy of what is before me to do. Enjoy now, not some day.

“God is depicted as bringing order out of chaos, and this is what scientists, serving God even if they think they are not, are doing. My scientific work is as holy as that of a priest. Kushner wrote, “…I am saying what I think and feel to be true, not what I think God wants to hear, and I have to believe that God respects that” (p. 21). The issue is not what we believe about God but about what we do. God’s existence is now unclear to me, but I continue to act on the assumption that God is love. This is the only way [for me] to be happy. Abram did not wait for all the answers before stepping out in faith.

“Rather than asserting, I am waiting, open to insight. As Kushner says, religion is not primarily a set of beliefs but a way of seeing. It cannot change the facts about the world but changes the way we see them…Here we are. What is our purpose? Religion shows us another answer from [that of] those who say our purpose is as consumers or as party members. Big religious leaders claim more, and less; they have grandiose eschatologies, and yet they tell their followers all they have to do is to give them money…

“Once humans became [in evolutionary time] intelligent enough to see the pain and misery of the world, religion was a way to keep going without being paralyzed. As long as we insist an Almighty God is on a throne, independent, then we can wonder why he allows suffering. But if we see God as having melded himself with creation, like bacteria evolving into mitochondria or mycorrhizae integrating into plant roots, we can see that, first, God cannot manipulate everything for us, and second, no priest is closer to God than we are. God is one with his world now. That is why life is good, not mere matter and energy. This is religion, from the Latin word for connection. It is not merely the carbon cycle, not merely evolution, that connects us with the soil and trees and animals. I feel connected because I am connected.”

I will continue exploring my 2005 journal in the next entry, and I hope it helps whoever may be reading this.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part one

I underwent my transition from doctrinal Christian to Christian agnostic almost exactly sixteen years ago. I had no blog at that time, so I wrote all my thoughts in a journal. I had written entries in the journal every day since 1989. I continue that journal, which now has over 11,500 entries and four and a half million words. The journal started off as a strict devotional, back when I was a fundamentalist. I am nearly a stranger now to the person I was at that time. In each entry, I studied scriptures, and then forced an evaluation of my life into a scriptural format. I seldom let my actual feelings show in those entries, since they were intended as an offering to God. But in 2005, all of that began to change. Until recently, I had not looked back at those entries. Now, I am curious about what I was thinking at that time and why. Perhaps some of this will resonate with you as well.

In case you think that religious fundamentalism is stupid and that is all there is to it, I remind you that religion is an appetite, just like the appetite for sex or food, and, in some of us, every bit as strong.

I used a strict devotional format of A (adoration), C (confession), T (thanksgiving), and S (supplication)—ACTS for short. But toward the end of 2004, my devotional format began to break down. By 2005 the ACTS structure had become “a pseudogene whose structure can be detected, sometimes and partially, in all that I write.” My daily entries became reflections of what I was experiencing, rather than what I was reading. I stopped regularly referencing Biblical passages. By that time, I had read and written about the entire Bible—as well as the Apocrypha—twice. I gradually slipped back into this practice, but not on a regular basis. My Biblical references were from the prophets, who struggled to understand what was happening on the Earth, as those whom the prophets considered to be God’s people were turning from him. I did not reread passages of doctrine and commandment. My journal entries changed from devotions to enigmas.

One major reason for the transition from fundamentalist to agnostic was that I was ill. Nearly every day, I was in a fog of tiredness, brought on by insomnia and muscle spasms that lasted nearly all night. I realized that I did not suffer nearly as much as millions of other people; but my complaint was part of a vast wave of suffering that God, if any, should hear. I felt I was going to surrender my vivid experiences into a brain-dead grayness. I literally thought I would die from the lack of sleep in a hospital. I was, at that time, on sabbatical, so I did not have a daily schedule of work, though I was writing book manuscripts, on which I put a great deal of effort. At last, I had surgery that corrected the sleep apnea. After I recovered from the surgery, I took a trip to see the desert and foothill wildflowers in Arizona and California in what turned out to be one of the best wildflower years. Thus, my rethinking of Christianity was started by personal suffering, but the suffering turned to the joy of seeing the beauty of the natural world. But, having once realized that I had been wrong about doctrinal Christianity, I did not go back to it.

Here follow (in this and later essays) some of the things I was thinking in January 2005. During my meditations, I was not talking to God, but to myself, although I liked to imagine that God was with me. Instead of holding onto God, I was letting him hold onto me, if he wanted to do so. I previously believed that God is love, but I now realized that love is God: “He exists within all processes, relationships, and situations of love.” I saw myself, and all humans, as “…protoplasm, sometimes twitching, sometimes broken, sometimes a broth for bacteria.” I decided to relax and accept the beauties of life that I could see, and listen for the “still, small voice” that Elijah found in the wilderness, “only I am not going to theomorphize it.”

I had great aspirations for myself, especially to become a well-known writer. That aspiration has not materialized as I hoped, although my five popular science books have been well received and widely read. I decided I would be satisfied to be a small plant down in the shade; it was not worth the effort and expense to try to be a tree, to be up in the light, where I might attract the attention of lumbermen.

I continued to write meditations, because I was ready to receive insights from God, though I did not seriously expect it. At the same time, I had to continue interacting with other people—my family and, once I was back from sabbatical, my colleagues and students—because I did not want to have bizarre ideas rise and grow in my isolated thoughts, “like island monsters.” (I was thinking of the strange species that evolve on islands.)

Join me in exploring these ideas born of struggle, leading away from doctrine and toward a certain measure of celebration.

Greek Mythology: Pretty Depressing, Most of It

Athena, the goddess of wisdom, committed violent and senseless acts. The king of the gods, Zeus, went around raping women, and his jealous wife Hera went around afflicting the women. Apollo, the god of Truth, was a liar. In addition to this, he loved a human woman, Coronis, but she didn’t like him, so he had her killed. And it goes downhill from there.

The human heroes, as well as the demigods, were also far from being models of behavior. Hercules, for example, was a total jerk except when he was depressed. One time he went crazy and killed his family. Then he felt such intense remorse that he forced his famous Labors upon himself. The Greek king Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia, so that the Greek ships could sail to Troy. Even after reading about it, I could not understand why Medea killed her children.

Punishments, meted by the gods upon demigods or humans, seemed random. Some, like Tantalus, deserved the eternal torture that they received in Hades. (In his case, he was eternally hungry, and fruit hung right before his mouth but moved away whenever he reached for it, forever, and he was eternally thirsty, and water came right up to his mouth, but flowed away when he tried to drink it, forever.) I think Tantalus was one of the guys who killed his children. There were a lot of those. But Sisyphus was condemned to roll the stone uphill forever from a minor infraction. The Danaïds had to carry water, forever and forever and forever, in jars with holes in them, then refill them, for reasons that were not clear to me even when I read about them. And poor Oedipus. It was apparently the whim of the gods that condemned him to kill his father and marry his mother, and not realize he was doing it. The mother of Tithonis asked that he receive eternal life. The gods granted it. But she forgot to ask for him to remain young. So, he lived forever, just getting older and older and older. He must be a pile of flesh somewhere even today; if you step in a pile of goo, it might be him. Helen was immortal unless someone killed her.

The logical Greek view of the universe, as written by philosophers, came after a long history in which people thought of themselves as part of a universe that made no sense, and could never make sense. I can imagine living in a world of Aristotle, where effects follow causes, but I cannot imagine living in the world of Homer. The gods were just like humans, some good, some bad, most of them alternately and unpredictably both. The only difference is that they were powerful and immortal. How can you even get up in the morning if you believe the world is unpredictable?

The Romans were so unimaginative that they took the whole load of Greek mythology and adopted it as their own, just changing some names, like Zeus into Jupiter, Chronos into Saturn, Hephaestus into Vulcan, etc.

There were some bright spots. You will find them in the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the Iliad, there was one brief moment of humanity, in which Achilles returned the body of Hector to Hector’s grieving father, Priam the king of Troy. And the Odyssey is stirring because, despite the stupidity of fate, Odysseus (Ulysses) never gave up his quest to return home to Ithaca and to his wife Penelope, now two decades older. Some consider the Odyssey the first, and possibly the greatest, novel ever written.

Another bright spot is that the Greeks did not yet have our modern sense of racism. Andromeda, one of the beautiful princesses rescued from sea monsters, was Ethiopian.

Against the background of randomness, the priests of the gods (especially at the oracles) could pretty much make up whatever they wanted and claim that it was the will of their particular god. The priests of Zeus would listen to the susurrus of the wind in the oak leaves to discern the god’s will. However much I love the wind in the trees, I think these priests were just making shit up.

The only thing worse than Greek mythology was Norse mythology, which was just as grim, but the gods, rather than being immortal, had to eventually die in the Götterdämmerung.

So, dear students, if you have to study Greek mythology, be prepared for some grim and tiresome stuff, except for an occasional beam of light that will enter your mind the way Zeus entered through a tiny slit into the dome where the human woman Danae dwelt.