Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part eight

I will post, with minimal editing, what I wrote on 15 March 2005, during my trip to see desert wildflowers. This was, as close as it is possible to determine, the exact date on which I became an agnostic.

“How can I begin to describe the beauty of the spring desert I beheld yesterday? And the greatest blessings came when I took the time to look closely, to slow down and immerse myself in it, to open myself to the Spirit.” While most people do not look closely at nature, out of a nation of 300 million, there must be a few million who do. “I must keep this in mind to counterbalance my cynicism, even though it is realistic and true…For the moment, I feel good not just about nature but even about the species of which I am a part.” I was reading a book, Evil and the God of Love, by John Hick. Hick “openly admitted ‘the fact of evil [which] constitutes the most serious objection there is to the Christian belief in a God of love.’ He calls it a fact; it is not, as Buddhists might say, an illusion, nor is it merely a form of human behavior. It is evil…Hick rejects an ‘inoffensive but unhelpful agnosticism,’ which provides ‘a perpetual burden of doubt’ to all believers, and has always done so, even back in the so-called Age of Faith. And Job’s answer, to be tremblingly quiet before God’s incomprehensible majesty, is not a solution…If God is intentionally involved in the world (and this may be his entire action), then we cannot expect God to see or manipulate the world from a cosmic viewpoint. Perhaps—I am speculating now—the Spirit Himself struggles to understand this? If so, then the Spirit’s answer is not an explanation but a delicate desert spring wildflower.”

I can remember where I was when I wrote this. I was eating breakfast in a restaurant in Yuma, Arizona. The trip I took out into the desert was spiritual as well as scientific.

The next day I wrote the following. To explore the wildflowers “was like walking in heaven. I also relived the beautiful part of my childhood,” when I walked amidst the spring wildflowers in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

But I continued reading and thinking about the problem of evil. The irrepressibly optimistic Harry Emerson Fosdick posed the opposite question to the problem of evil: “why is there so much inexplicable good in the world? Since the time of Fosdick, and of C. S. Lewis’s similar argument, altruism has been discovered. But it does not explain all of the goodness, greatness, our capacity for wisdom, love, science, and (what I now experience) biophilia.” This does not answer the problem of evil, “but what else can I do but stumble amidst flowers and rejoice while I can? I can rejoice in the flow of the Spirit, and say that this is the entirety of God’s work here and now. The Spirit also cleanses away the scabs of anger and the rot of selfishness.

“It does no good, Hick claims, to blame Satan, for now we just have to explain why God permitted Satan to exist, nor does it do any good to appeal to the finitude of creatureliness [only a theologian could come up with this], because even within our limits we could be good but are not. Sorry, John, but we will not reason out a solution. Our only response can be like a visitor to the desert spring, seeing a brief symphony of joy in a hard land, or a visitor to the desert summer, who can see nothing good but who must force himself to admit that life persists dormant.”

I continued to think about my deteriorating health. “There will be no miracles for me. But in the event that I survive, I will be an imperfect conduit of the Spirit, and enjoy it. God “allowed at least one species to evolve the intelligence to appreciate…that though most organisms simply decay, a few re-emerge as fossils, as objects of beauty…”

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part seven

 

[Rabbi] Kushner [whose book I was reading in 2005] said that prayer is just to remind us to be grateful for things, on a regular schedule, including for things it would not otherwise occur to us to be grateful for. God needs no praise, but He knows we need to feel gratitude. When I wrote about this on 7 March 2005, I felt as if I agreed with him. The answer to our prayers “is not an explanation but an experience. An often-overlooked benefit of prayer is that it changes us, so that we no longer envy the wicked.”

Three days later, I wrote, “My valleys of shadow, compared to others’, are often little mud-walled arroyos, such as I will soon see in the desert, but they seemed pretty dark to me anyway, and if you cannot climb out of them, they are deep enough.” I was already looking forward to my trip out west to see the desert wildflowers.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part six

Here is a little interlude, which I needed during my heavy thoughts, and which you, the reader (if any) also need. I wrote this on 2 March 2005.

“And, finally, isn’t it past all rational solution? As I have repeatedly pondered, do I not believe in God because Dvorak did? Nietzsche had penetrating questions, or so I who have never read him am told. How to answer him? Kierkegaard’s leap? A scientist resists it but what else is there? What Mahler did was to celebrate evolution in his Resurrection Symphony. The stages of life on Earth: vegetative (second movement), animated (third movement), then to set Nietzsche to music (fourth movement), angels in heaven (fifth movement) as if it were a progression. But really it was just to put atheism and heaven next to each other, then goes on (sixth movement) to celebrate love. He listened, out in his summerhouse in the mountain meadow: ‘What the flowers in the meadow tell me,’ ‘What the animals in the forest tell me,’ ‘What the night tells me,’ ‘What the morning bells tell me,” and ‘What love tells me.’ Maybe these things all contradict one another; all we can do is listen.

 

“It helps to have friends with which to share this. Mahler had gotten over his love for Johanna Richter in the 1880s. He had a friend in the 1890s, Natalie Bauer-Lechner, who traveled with him and wrote down his thoughts. She was the one who wrote down the titles above. What was he thinking, not to embrace her after Alma Schindler had betrayed him. Ah, friendship is better than romance, as Mahler found out too late.”

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, Part Five

I wrote on 29 January 2005, “If God is, then God is love, and forgives me when I ask forgiveness for my rage against Him and, in fact, He understands it…I see no God dropping nuggets of revelation from Heaven. That’s because He exists in our wisdom, however obscurely, and since His work is what we do, I can no longer ask for miracles…” There is utterly no evidence of God; the most convincing thing about belief in God is that Antonin Dvorak wrote “thanks be to God” at the end of every one of his pieces of music. I said for a while, I believe in God because Dvorak did.

God, I saw, seems to punish every good deed. I wrote on 6 February 2005, “Jesus is the epitome of every trait that God punishes throughout history…I almost feel I am being punished for loving what is calm, green, and constructive rather than raping the planet like a good consumer…It is enough to make you think that God really does want the lords of the demesne to rule and the rest of us to be serfs.”

I continued suffering, worse and worse despite medication. I thought I would stumble along until sweet death dissolved me. It was almost as if demons were fine-tuning my pain. How would I know? But demons, I figured, were not smart enough to do this. “They would leave a fork-prong or a dab of deviled ham lying around where a scientist would find it” if they caused diseases.

Despite this, I wrote on 12 February, I still had a deep ineradicable joy. “The desire for wisdom is basic to all my perception of the world, no matter how rigidly or fluidly, happily or gloomily, adjectively or adverbially, my physical carnal synapses assemble a model of reality out of the photons, pressures, and chemical compositions of the cosmos around me.” This was the 196^th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth; I imagine he might have thought the same thing were he alive today. In order to maintain my happiness, I had to wear a hard plastron on my breast to protect my heart as I drag myself over the rough earth. “I attained wisdom, and God saw me, and slapped me down into a gray continuum of semi-wakefulness.”

Nevertheless, I continued to write on that same day, “I am ready to be convinced. Sometimes it seems as if the Spirit of love does make some progress. The false spring, the frost killing the fresh verdure of Prague in 1968 was eventually followed by a true Czech spring; however imperfect, it would have inspired some crazy-dancing hemiola and G double sharps from Dvorak. And to me the beauty of science, literature, poetry, and music are inexpressible; confronted by them, as by a burning bush, I cannot remain morose.”

The result, I wrote on the next day, was counter-intuitive: I was laying each moment at God’s altar. “Then, oh this is wondrous strange, I am free to savor each moment, so I stumble along, deeply happy. I have no life, but only a series of moments each of which I make meaningful. If I live another 30 years, it will not be 30 years but 10,950 days at the beginning of each of which I will say, What, I’m still alive? What shall I do today? I no longer if I live, but if I do, I will make another day of progress towards goals which, if completed, will be good.”

I no longer suffer as much, but I still write down the blessings, as well as the setbacks, of each day. I would recommend that you do also. Write it down. You can look back at it and be amazed at how much, or how little, your life has changed.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part four.

 

I here continue posting passages from my private journal, in which I document my transition away from fundamentalism and toward Christian agnosticism.

Here is some of what I wrote on 17 February of 2005. “Churchy people imagine God with a sword and a plan, who hands them the sword and reveals the plan which, marvelously enough, just happens to be what they were going to do anyway.”

I particularly struggled with the Trinity. Nobody seems to have a clue about the Holy Spirit. Much of my angst came from trying to force two-thirds of a God to do the work of the other one-third. It finally became apparent to me that what I was seeking was the Spirit, not God or Jesus. This Spirit “is the only presence of God in our universe—to love the flowers and trees, and help others do so, and associate with those who do; to not be surprised when people we had assumed to have true inner goodness turn out to be merely selfish; to await and use opportunities for helping to bring light into the world. This is all we can do, in a world where God’s presence is only through a Spirit who does not impart any answers but only creates love, where God’s presence does not create any miraculous interventions, but works only through the quiet mulch of those who love…I cannot ask God to humble the arrogant; I must just be happy that the arrogant have not yet stamped dead every flower in the world.”

On 24 February, I wrote, “But the main lesson, for those of us who truly have the Spirit of love in our hearts and are always in exile in a world run by selfishness at best, cruelty at worst, is that we must settle in, live our lives, raise families, take care of the earth, and be a blessing to all of society around us.”

Then in that same entry I wrote some humor that had occurred to me during my sleep study, when I was wired up to a computer with lots of sticky electrodes on my scalp. “In Hansel and Gretel, Englebert Humperdinck wrote something like, When I lay me down to sleep, fourteen angels watch do keep… Why stop at fourteen? Why not one for each organ, each hair follicle, or…During the sleep study, the computer (and the technician) monitored at least fourteen things, like an angel for each eyelid, my nose, four points on my cranium—is that what a Humperdinckian God is like? The computer recorded my every breath and blink. Not my every fart, there were no sensors there, but if pressed to answer, a fundamentalist would say God notices and remembers our every flatus.”

But I also wondered about the synchronicities I experienced in my life—things happening at just the eerily right times. As if “God has written me into His novel which is being carefully read by fourteen angels who have infinite time, since they have all the time in the world.” I still do not know if there might be some hidden structure to the universe, or whether these synchronicities were merely coincidences. And there is not much chance that I will ever figure it out.

The Excruciating Pain of Reading Old Novels

I suppose we should be happy that our society has moved away from racism and sexism, however incompletely, and however vigorously conservatives have resisted it. Also, we should be happy that fiction has moved away from pretentious and shallow writing (or not). What is there to not like about this? Right after this essay, I will get back to my series about how I became a Christian agnostic.

One thing is that there are hardly any old novels that we can read that do not make us cringe. I will use just one example: Sinclair Lewis, the first American writer to have received the Nobel Prize for literature. One of his major novels is Main Street. I thought that I should read this novel (which was in my giveaway pile). Even though I enjoyed his Arrowsmith when I read it decades ago. Arrowsmith was about a microbiologist in public health—what’s there not to like about that?

But Lewis’s writing would have gotten it immediately (and perhaps correctly) rejected by any modern agent or editor. To start with, the narration was self-consciously clever. Just to use one example, he wrote of the female character, “Ever she effervesced anew…” The main character was also not credible. She was a flighty college girl who had ever such a difficult time deciding what to do with her life, until she decided that she would leave the city and go out to a “prairie town” and tell them how to transform their stolidity into elegance. Even if such a character could exist, she is not someone I would want to spend lots of reading-time with. Agents always say, in their automatic rejection software, that “I didn’t connect with the character,” which implies that they actually looked at your submission. But in this case, it is true: it is difficult, if not impossible, to care about this person. Actually, she sounds like a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald characters.

Even worse, Lewis begins with a snub of “squaws and portages,” by which he dismisses the Native Americans (in this case of Minnesota) as gruesomely boring. Only white people are interesting or have stories worth telling, in the Lewisian mindset.

A few novels from the early twentieth century told interesting stories from non-white cultures. One immediately thinks of The Good Earth by Pearl Buck. While the entire novel is written in a condescending, paternalistic mode, The Good Earth was, within its context, an attempt to see an Asian culture with real people, good and bad, completely apart from white culture.

We now squirm with discomfort at the entertainment of nearly all previous ages, for example Spike Jones and His City Slickers performing Hawaiian War Chant. While we may lose much of value by turning our noses up at the past, it is the inevitable side-effect of ethical progress. In a similar way, while we may lose much insight by turning away from the religion, and religious writings, of the past—such as the Bible—it is necessary that we do so.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part three

This is a continuation of insights that I wrote in my daily journal back in 2005, as I tried to navigate a transition from doctrinal Christianity to a Christian-spirituality-agnosticism.

But if God is in me, as in all creation, he is experiencing creation. He is in me in a way he is not in a rock, because in me he experiences consciousness. As I continued on 24 January 2005, if God pervades all of nature, “occasionally tendrils of the holy come together, coalesce, react, sprout into phenomena that deny explanation…All I know is that music and color and science are all more beautiful than we have any right to expect.” The next month I wrote, God pervades everything but does not actually cause anything in the Newtonian sense.

At the same time, I admitted the truth of agnosticism: “All of conservative Christianity is a scab that hides true religion and, in order to prevent the scab itself from being shed, doctrinal Christianity prevents healing.” It keeps you scratching at the wound. It keeps you going to church, instead of healing your mind and returning to clear and happy thought. “Religion is the great fester on the sick body of humanity.

“There is both senseless chaos and blessed order in the world. There is frightful chaos that is not God’s will…Each day we must reaffirm whether we concentrate on the beauty or on the terror. I have several reasons for choosing the beautiful. First, if I cannot be sure there is no God, then I assume there is. Second, our evolution has made us religious, and the mind requires some kind of religion just as the body requires vitamin C, so I might as well choose a healthy religion. Third, it is deeply, not intermittently, pleasurable to have a good religion. Just as our eyes and mind create a model of the world, with things such as color that are not really there, so our minds create religious order.

“…I swim through a reality of God’s thick presence. Thick light, the antithesis of Thick Darkness. [I am not sure what this means. But I just like the imagery. It helps me live. The Bible in several places used the imagery of thick darkness, the kind of foggy darkness through which you cannot even see a ray of distant light. I wrote a series of novels with this name. Thick light is the kind of light in which you cannot see the light source, but it is all around you.]

“Religion is a coping mechanism. We can face disasters but not chaos. The question Can I trust the world requires a religious, rather than a scientific, answer…We must simultaneously admit suffering yet affirm the good in the world. The mother telling the child everything will be all right, and religion telling us the same thing: both are equally truth or lie. No one would think of censuring the consoling mother.

“…the pursuit of goodness and love is worth it, even if no one ever hears a heavenly voice saying, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’”