Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
We create the meaning.
I had lunch the other day with an old friend and fellow atheist. It’s ironic that we really only get to see one another during the Christmas period, when he is in town to visit family.
In the course of the wide-ranging conversation (we share many opinions, and differ just enough on some others to keep things lively), he mentioned that he thought that what my wife and I were doing in caring for her mom was praiseworthy.
I thanked him, and explained something I usually don’t tell people. I told him that some time back, when my wife and I were discussing such plans with her mom (back when she could do so, understanding the relevant issues), she indicated that she didn’t want to go to a nursing home, but wanted to stay in her home of 50+ years until she died. Nothing unusual in that - it is a common enough desire. But I felt that since she, herself, had cared for a child born with a significant disability (cerebral palsy) for over 40 years, she deserved to have her wish honored, insofar as we were able to do so.
My friend nodded. “Without having recourse to a heaven for our rewards, we have to create the ‘meaning’ of our life here, now, ourselves, and do the same for others when we can.”
I think that this is something that theists just do not understand about us atheists. Or perhaps the implications of it just scares the living daylights out of them. Without a sky-daddy, or tribunal, or Karmic Wheel, or Big Magic JuJu Guy (thanks, Hank, I love that!) to sit in judgment of our lives and hand out punishments and rewards, the *responsibility* for making this life have meaning is ours and ours alone. We don’t get to pass the buck upstairs, or just shrug and say that it is in God’s hands. We, and only we, can work to make things better. With all of the resources available to us, with the powers created by human ingenuity, we could make this world, this life, a paradise, if we so choose. That we haven’t, that much of the world still lives in poverty and fear, that much of our energy is turned to hate and destruction, is one hell of an indictment.
May we all work to have a better year than this one has been. Best wishes,
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to dKos.)
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God, in convenient pill form
Great post, Jim.
However, please remember to use the full name of the Big Magic Juju Guy. Abbreviating His holy name with a BM carries that unfortunate association with Bowel Movements, and detracts from the proper appreciation of his beneficent unrealness.
...
I think sometimes of the difference between atheists and godders in terms of addictions. I've had some minor addictions of my own, and I'm fairly clear on what they've done to my life.
One thing they do is help you avoid your hard truths. They Put Off ... understandings, resolutions, realizations. Hard choices.
You come up to a life problem, say a natural transition from a childhood view of relationships (I want, gimme, do something for ME) to an adult understanding of relationships (I love, I give, I’m a partner, I’m strong enough to provide support to YOU), and if you have an addiction, you can avoid the critical realizations that help you make that possibly painful transition. You stay on the childhood side of the transition line longer. But because adults simply can’t stay children – other adults (and children) need you to be an adult – you experience turbulence in all your relationships with others ... for as long as you fail to make that transition.
Gambling, alcohol, drugs, TV, the Internet, sex – whatever the addiction, it sucks something out of you, holds you back, retards your growth.
But none of those things can compare to religion. Because religion affects not only the person addicted to it, but the whole society in which it serves as the primary addiction. (It’s no mystery why conservative religions force their victims to give up most other potentially-addictive pleasures – the extreme form of Islam allows for the use of no alcohol, for instance, and is so restrictive in terms of sex that men aren’t even allowed to see women’s faces.)
Inwardly, atheists have the advantage that they pretty much have to face up to mortality, and once you do that, sometime after you have this Aha! moment that tells you you have to be nice NOW. You have to tell people you love them NOW. You have to settle the unsettled NOW. You have to be responsible NOW. You have to pay the bills NOW. You have to take your kids to the park, or your beloved dog for a walk, NOW.
Outwardly, atheists have the sucky disadvantage that they have to live in a world largely made by godders. They can see something of the turbulence of a society-wide addiction, but they have to live in it anyway.
For myself, I consider religion to be the ultimate addiction. It’s a pervasive miasma that has affected us in ways we can’t even see. We’re fish who have grown up in poisoned water, and not only can we not see the water, we can’t tell how deeply we’re poisoned.
In a past essay, “Sucking Up to the Virgin Mary,” I wrote about the price of religion: If you place the formal origin-point of science as the establishment of the British Royal Society in 1660 (it’s a convenient marker for me, anyway), we’ve had actual Science for less than 350 years. Yet today we can pop open people’s chests like automobile hoods and get the broken “engines” inside running better. I’ll bet I know a dozen cancer survivors (and I count myself among them). I know of a guy who should have died decades ago – yet he is today probably the most famous mathematician in the world.
Only because of vigorous, questing, creative, inventive science.
Compare this to the reign of religion – call it 2,000 years (although it’s probably more like 20,000, ten times that) – and the problem-solving technological wonders it’s produced. You get ... zero. Nothing. Zip. Worse than nothing, actually, because religion has been a steady enemy of science for all its history.
I saw an article not long back about the top ten technological/scientific contributions of Muslims – NONE of them were later than the 1600s, and some of them were from the 7th century. Say what you will, this is a pathetically distant reach for a meager scrap of pride. Islam sucked the intellectual life out of the Arabs and Persians.
Christianity comes off no better: From Giordano Bruno to Pope Palpatine’s regressive recent saber rattling against evolution, the Catholic Church has been a steady enemy of any advance, any intellectual freedom, to the limits of its powers.
Looking back on that 2,000 years, what might we have accomplished?
As I half-jokingly wrote in “Sucking Up,” if it wasn't for religion, we might today be near-immortals living on a paradise planet, reading books written by gene-engineered elephants and watching Oprah interview intelligent chimpanzees on Mars.
As it is, we're only HERE, where somebody's kid actually starved to death last night because we couldn’t seem to get food to her, and where the proudest life-accomplishment of the leader of the most powerful nation on the planet was the starting up of a killing machine – a war.
By contrast with where we could be, it seems to me that we live in an enormously dark era. It’s like we're all walking around on broken legs ... but because we don’t know any different, we think it's NORMAL. If everybody else has broken legs, nobody has any idea what it might feel like to stand up straight. If everybody has broken legs, maybe it’s an actual sin – an mortal insult to everybody else – to run.
So we stagger. On the lip of a deadly-dangerous cliff (global warming, among other environmental chasms), we joyride onward. We gulp down our 180-proof religion and we feel no pain.
Every environmental problem you might imagine has as its foundation the problem of human population. Way too many people. Yet we soar past 6 billions of us and continue to talk about conservation as if it COULD work if we all only do it hard enough. And meanwhile, every church I ever heard of thinks putting a tenth of an ounce of latex on your dick stokes up the eternal fires of hell.
Putting it mildly, I think our global environmental outlook is ... poopy. And I think it’s because we’ve welcomed religion, the addictive mother of all sloppy thinking, into our brains.
Given the fact of the vast power of religion over the brain-damaged addicts who partake of it, I have no idea how to avoid the coming cliff. It seems to me that we’re well below some critical lower limit of vigorous, questing, creative, inventive THINKING minds.
But ... hey, it’s no big deal, right? Paradise is waitin’ for us, ain’t it? Sweet Baby Jesus, Hallelujah! Pass me that bottle, Leroy, and hand me them dice – I’m feeling LUCKY tonight! I just know the Lord is gonna take out the trash, and fill the oceans with fish again (or maybe we’ll all just live off, like, sunbeams and stuff) and – if we only pray hard enough – the flowers will bloom year-round and the lion will lie down with the lamb, and He will make everything be okay.
Religion as avoidance
I'm at work, so I am not reading your whole post. One point caught me, though, and reminded me of one of my moments. You say: "whatever the addiction, it sucks something out of you, holds you back, retards your growth. But none of those things can compare to religion."
Twenty years ago, at a childbirth center where my pregnant wife was getting a checkup, I overheard a conversation between two of the other women. One said, "I'm sorry for your loss," and the other replied, "It's the lord's will." My assumption was that the second woman had had a miscarriage, and I found myself getting very angry -- and I still do when I tell the story -- at how, in my judgment, she was disavowing any responsibility for feelings of loss by ascribing it to the inscrutable actions of the cosmic muffin. My wife suffered two miscarriages before our first successful birth, and the reaction was overpowering. Despite that pain, though, I know I learned a lot, as I have from any great experience of pain in my life. What a loss, I thought, that this woman would so distance herself from that experience and what she could learn from it, by forwarding it to her god. That was a big moment for me, particular since I've continued to learn a lot from it since then.
Happy new year.
Excellent response...
Hank, you should be a Preacher. Seriously. Hey Brent, can we designate Hank our Atheist Preacher or something?
Funny, you also hit most of the major points of discussion between me and my buddy at the lunch cited. I've long had a pet theory that intelligent aliens stopped by to visit Earth a couple of millennia ago, saw what we were up to and decided that they needed to slow us down - and so, introduced the idea of monotheism. It is one of the ideas kicking around "under" my novel, in fact.
You might enjoy reading some of the discussion of the post over on dKos.
And thank for the heads-up on Big Magic. I will edit accordingly. Don't wanna tick off the big guy.
Jim Downey
"Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering."
- R. Buckminster Fuller
only one problem
... with your idea, monotheism is older than Christianity (not by much, probably only a few thousand years older, but still). I saw this video years ago about UFO references in the Bible (can't remember why I was watching it, I think it was at a planetarium show). Anyway they said something about the tale of Moses seeing a flaming pillar of clouds (or something like that) sounded like a space ship and that Moses getting grey hair after talking to god (Oh sorry, Great big magic Juju faerie) sounded like symptoms of radiation poisoning.
If they were aliens, they were pretty damn stupid. Now instead of being ignorant pricks humans are ignorant pricks that think that they have a godly mandate to conquer everything in sight.
Discussion on dKos
Not sure which discussion you're referring to, but I'd like to take a look. Is there a link to the thing on dKos?
Ayup.
Link at the bottom of my post (may not show up in your browser, since I added that this morning and your machine may be running off the old cache). Here it is again: dKos
Jim Downey
"Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering."
- R. Buckminster Fuller
I think it's more basal than meaning
Atheists can be good people, just like (or even more than) theists. Only lacking the belief that the Rapture will come in the next few decades, they show their goodness by doing good works, like you and your wife have done, rather than by evangelizing or demanding a state-recognized right to discriminate against others.