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.’”

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.