The blistering irony of this entrenched school of Creationists is that every one, down to the last purblind book-burner, seems dead-set on roping the theoretical world down to a base of the most exhausting uncreativeness. The stale, repeated dogmas that exemplify man’s unique capacity to combine a mind-stabbing irrationality with a Grand Inquisitor’s hate; the deep-seated determination, stemming from a well-masked resentment, to debase all freedom and happiness; the anxiety, and, overall, the fear of something completely foreign to them: these things and other unutterable absurdities somehow always combine in just the right proportions to produce those blithering dogmatists—a process which might, with a laughing glimmer of divinity, be the sole stirring argument against an evolution that thins the cowards and weaklings.
The paradox is that most Christians deny God as they affirm him, shout the existence of an all-powerful God while limiting that power to their own ability to conceive its manifestations. All hail the God of the Picket Sign.
But I must ask, is the amount of time and effort, the emotions and souls lying broken on the wayside, the men and women you’ll distance forever with your almighty and arbitrary vehemence—are all these things worth it? Does the how of this divine existence matter more than…than existence itself? Would you, you silly child, argue with God your father if he told you himself that he liked to take his damn time?
Let’s examine the case.
First, the Biblical material. We have a mythological creation story. Correct, kind, blind sir, mythological. Examine the context: historical, cultural, linguistic. In fact, we have two creation stories (catch that?), written about four centuries apart and by completely different traditions. No sir, Moses had no part in this. That’s a fact. In fact, the two stories were not really authored by anyone—they are all that remains of a transcribed oral tradition. And just like the cosmogonical stories of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and all the surrounding….
But let me just stop here, because I have a feeling we have just encountered a larger problem. The problem, Sir Creationist, is that you have already stopped listening to me. If you are a bit more sophisticated, you will take advantage of this pause to launch into your rehearsed assortment of anti-liberal bullshit and condemnations of modern science, painting fallacies through my words and misinterpreting to no end, digressing about my fundamental presuppositions and whatnot. If you are the common Creationist layman sort, you will simply give me a dirty look and call me a damned atheist.
No, sir. I am no atheist. The truth is, I might just possess more faith than you. What? Yes, by the highly scientific definition of faith as non-leaningness, I do. For I am not leaning on my stilted argumentative techniques, my contrived proofs and disproofs or my general hatred of any unimpeded son-of-a-bitch who dares to defy society’s faceless mandates (i.e. God’s eternal Law). Faith is infinite resignation: to give up all that has previously given you that sense of security, all that you have previously relied on, whether it’s your stocks, your bonds, your wife, your groundless theories, your preacher’s jokes, your way of life. Jesus said to lose your life for his sake (Matthew 10:39), to leave everything, and it is peculiarly significant here that he also commands us to have no place to lay our heads.
(You see, I am capable of digressing about the elusiveness of faith, the delicious seduction of an unattainable definition. My metaphors lie pining, my words fall short. Your faith is a legal document. You should be ashamed of your ABCs.)
The goal is to seek the truth without cementing it. The goal is to follow God’s commandment against idols. The goal is to worship God over our theories of how He did it.
But these Christians still murder the wide-eyed mysteries of the universe. I say, long live the atheists, the killers of God—for they have opened up the door to a stranger who knocks. They are the salt of the earth when the salt loses its saltiness.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Diagnosis: Sanity
Religion is the domain of the human spirit. It is a big boy’s game, unassailable by the infantile critiques of science and merely rational people. The illusion is that the faithful (in the wider sense) are lukewarm; in reality, religion is a calling so high that it necessarily breeds a dialectic of faiths pregnant and bursting with the polar void. Either/Or. Either you have faith (i.e. true faith), or you reflect your self-hatred upon the world (i.e. popular faith). Religion is the great irremovable mirror. Either you define your life by constant change, progression, movement—or you wither into a shell of a human being, you murder the world on the altar of your guilt. You win or lose, you live or die, but there is no in-between, and you will be supremely human on either branch—either angelic or demonic in your humanity.
The secular world, on the other hand, calls for the middle path, the wide road, the reasonable alternative. But we are not called to be reasonable. What is reason, anyway? By most accounts, it is merely enlightened self-interest. And that is the fundamental error in a scientific, reasonable perspective on true religion: the reasonable man regards religion as merely antiquated self-interest; he is the true knower. He looks at the sacrifices to the weather gods, the prayers of petition, the benefits of a unified ethic, an us-versus-them mentality, and his reasonableness seems better suited for his own preconceived, unself-conscious presumption: the primacy of self-preservation.
When, in reality, the truly pious are swirled toward a vortex which they do not even understand, they are blinded by a reality that transcends the aims of reason.
The question is not, “Are we ready to embrace reason?” It is, rather, “Are we ready to forfeit the danger of our humanity?”
The mass-movement of faith is essentially faithlessness. This I will, with God and the heavenly host behind me, concede. Faith, defined by its most popular usage, is cowardice; the driving proof of our faith is not what Kierkegaard described—faith itself—and not as the worldly realists demand—Evidence! Evidence!—but rather, our own emotional need. Hence that conservative fear of knowledge, that attack on freedom. The truth is, we want the world to be as somnolent as we ourselves, we demand that they stop interfering with our dreams as we squeeze our eyes shut in pretence of unconsciousness. Oh, we know the world awaits. We just refuse to wake up.
And yet, have I contradicted myself? (Who cares, really?) Truth, as usual, hides her face behind a veil of incomprehensible complexity, a guise of ever-morphing subtlety that forever eludes formulation. For who, really, is the coward here? (“Cowardice is not the crux of the question, I want evidence, evidence! Down, down, down with the praise of human nobility!”) The Christian, who, though perhaps fearful of the empirical assault, though demanding support for his faith (in numbers, in “proofs,” in signs and wonders—all contradictions of faith, at bottom), still manages to maintain his human ascendancy, believes without seeing, takes that leap of faith which requires indomitable courage and individuality—or the cold, hard scientist who refuses to risk error, falls back in the same way on his ungrounded assumptions, but with an aspect of grotesqueness in his pompous leaning, who refuses to live dangerously and, yea verily, for that loses his soul, his life, his ineffable particularity—his humanity?
Who wins, between these two? I guess it depends on the game. The atheist loses his soul but gains the world: his precious, concrete, scientific (subjective, debauched, infinitely contingent) world. The believer? Ah, just turn the table and pour God into the adjectives.
The secular world, on the other hand, calls for the middle path, the wide road, the reasonable alternative. But we are not called to be reasonable. What is reason, anyway? By most accounts, it is merely enlightened self-interest. And that is the fundamental error in a scientific, reasonable perspective on true religion: the reasonable man regards religion as merely antiquated self-interest; he is the true knower. He looks at the sacrifices to the weather gods, the prayers of petition, the benefits of a unified ethic, an us-versus-them mentality, and his reasonableness seems better suited for his own preconceived, unself-conscious presumption: the primacy of self-preservation.
When, in reality, the truly pious are swirled toward a vortex which they do not even understand, they are blinded by a reality that transcends the aims of reason.
The question is not, “Are we ready to embrace reason?” It is, rather, “Are we ready to forfeit the danger of our humanity?”
The mass-movement of faith is essentially faithlessness. This I will, with God and the heavenly host behind me, concede. Faith, defined by its most popular usage, is cowardice; the driving proof of our faith is not what Kierkegaard described—faith itself—and not as the worldly realists demand—Evidence! Evidence!—but rather, our own emotional need. Hence that conservative fear of knowledge, that attack on freedom. The truth is, we want the world to be as somnolent as we ourselves, we demand that they stop interfering with our dreams as we squeeze our eyes shut in pretence of unconsciousness. Oh, we know the world awaits. We just refuse to wake up.
And yet, have I contradicted myself? (Who cares, really?) Truth, as usual, hides her face behind a veil of incomprehensible complexity, a guise of ever-morphing subtlety that forever eludes formulation. For who, really, is the coward here? (“Cowardice is not the crux of the question, I want evidence, evidence! Down, down, down with the praise of human nobility!”) The Christian, who, though perhaps fearful of the empirical assault, though demanding support for his faith (in numbers, in “proofs,” in signs and wonders—all contradictions of faith, at bottom), still manages to maintain his human ascendancy, believes without seeing, takes that leap of faith which requires indomitable courage and individuality—or the cold, hard scientist who refuses to risk error, falls back in the same way on his ungrounded assumptions, but with an aspect of grotesqueness in his pompous leaning, who refuses to live dangerously and, yea verily, for that loses his soul, his life, his ineffable particularity—his humanity?
Who wins, between these two? I guess it depends on the game. The atheist loses his soul but gains the world: his precious, concrete, scientific (subjective, debauched, infinitely contingent) world. The believer? Ah, just turn the table and pour God into the adjectives.
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