A friend recently told me that when we first met, he was surprised to find out that I believed in God because he “thought that all smart people were atheists.” I used to think that too because, after all, I did some very stupid things as a religious adolescent. But then I met some really stupid atheists. And I did some stupid things as an atheist too. I’ve gone through phases of both ardent religiosity and deep skepticism. I know what it’s like to squirm while someone tries to press upon you religious convictions that you don’t agree with or just don’t want to hear. I’ve also been the person doing those awkward things.
Once, after dwelling perhaps too deeply on a hymn, I announced to my eighth grade English class, “I have decided to adopt the eagle as my personal mascot.” I also invited my best friend to my Catholic youth group and then warned her to mind her atheist manners—which, it turns out, was the wrong thing to say. I wouldn’t be surprised if this blog forayed into such awkward material at a future date, but I’m going to try not to make that happen right now.
I have a lot of atheist friends—certainly more atheist friends than Muslim friends—and I’ve been trying to figure out how to bring them into the conversation of this blog, to have the kind of respectful discussion that I’ve always enjoyed with them. In Yann Martel’s book Life of Pi, Pi feels that atheists are his brothers and sisters of another faith. What I feel is that we share a faith in human reason and the value of rational discourse.
Where we differ is in our understanding of where that reason comes from. I believe that the human intellect comes from God, and that we have a responsibility to use that intellect to the best of our ability. It seems like so many problems in the world come from people refusing to use their brains and from the incessant dumbing-down of cultural and global conversations. We find it easier to assign blame than to think about things, and unfortunately, people in power stand to benefit from and pander to that eagerness to stop thinking. It also seems like the refusal to think is sometimes blamed on faith in God. But my faith tells me to think. In fact, I can only understand the force of God in our world by using my intellect.
When I was moving away from agnosticism and toward Islam, my dominant feeling was that there was something transcendent about the world and our existence in it. In her posthumously published Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf writes:
From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
I loved this quote when I was an agnostic, and I still love it now. Woolf’s hidden pattern is what I call God. Some deists call it the Oversoul. Quantum physicists call it the collective unconscious. It’s something that unites us and connects us to the physical world and to each other. It’s there to be discussed and experienced. The mere idea of God should not have to be a source of strife. Because if it is, we’re playing into the powers in this world that wish us to stop thinking and sharing ideas. That’s part of the anti-intellectualism we face.
Some of the most ethical, moral people I know are atheists or agnostics, and it’s easy to talk to them about social justice and philosophy and politics and concerns that embrace all of humanity. For me, the fact that we can access morality through our reason is one of the proofs of God. In his book, In the Footsteps of the Prophet, Tariq Ramadan writes, “Islam and its message came to confirm the substance of a treaty that human conscience had already independently formulated.” Ramadan is referring to a specific treaty that the Prophet Muhammad—may the peace of God be on him—participated in before Islam, and that he upheld after Islam.
What I take from this is that in secular society, it is our responsibility to use our reason to establish justice. This seems like such an obvious thing to say. Both atheists and Muslims, along with many other religious people, find this manifestly true. Yet we see rational thinking coming under attack, especially in this election season. Whether you find it obvious or surprising, atheists and Muslims are on the same side—along with people of all other religions who value justice and reason. We need to think and act like it.
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I think that one of the more interesting sections of Reddit is the /atheism subreddit. Not because it is about atheism, but rather the quality of arguments, and even minds, that tend to populate it, and this really echoes something Caitie said: that there are some really stupid atheists. Where once I thought that atheism was, particularly for individuals like me that were raised as Christians, a deeply personal intellectual decision that was the end result of many years of theological toil, I have come to see that for many "atheists," it is not. Rather, it appears to be what "all smart people do." Being Reddit nerds that masturbate to the holy icons of Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan, it's easy to see how they came to jump on the atheism bandwagon - because no true nerd would ever dare subscribe to any notion that wasn't "smart."
ReplyDeleteThis unthinking, hivemind mentality can be seen broadly through the recent KONY 2012 proliferation throughout Facebook and other social media platforms. The video, which has been widely criticized by international aid organizations as dramatically oversimplifying a complex, if terrible, situation, has nonetheless captivated millions of Facebook activists, and I am sure that Invisible Children will reap record-setting donation levels by the end of March. What's troubling about all of the Facebook protest calls for action is that .. it appears little real thought, or even background research, has gone into the opinions of Western folks that appear to care. This is exactly the sort of issue, much like Afghanistan, parts of Pakistan, and I guess even still Iraq, that cannot be fixed by simply throwing more money at the situation and sending yet more military advisors.
This is kind of getting away from what I wanted to talk about: rationality, and the critical importance of the informed thought process. I'll be perfectly honest here: broadly speaking, I am fucking terrified of Muslims. This fear sickens me, and is something I am actively working against, but it is difficult. Raised in a suburbs north of Flint, where everyone was very white and very Catholic or Protestant, I graduated high school in a class with two black people, four or five Asians, and literally hundreds of white people. Both culturally, intellectually, and spiritually, Islam is entirely foreign to me. I'll be honest again: the mass media has not helped, despite my understanding that it is largely controlled and directed with the explicit intent of making me hate anything non-WASP.
[part 2 - apparently there is a cap on these things.]
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, I recognize and deeply admire that Islam, if not the entire Arab world, has a long tradition of both intellectualism and skepticism. Were it not for the preservation of Greek and other old-world intellectual achievements during the European Dark Ages by the Muslim world, much of the foundation of Western thought would have been entirely lost. As an atheist, it is difficult to not adore (what I remember from a class in college) the Islamic tradition of skepticism, of question, of a desire to know and to understand. Unlike in the West, where scientists of nearly all kinds, mathematicians, surgeons, and nearly any form of intellectual are practically required to be an atheist, this does not appear to be the case among Muslims. This stands in stark contrast to the Christianity of the United States, which almost appears to demand ignorance and blind acceptance of dogma in order to participate.
Still, it is strange, as an atheist, to have found a sort-of ally in aspects of Islam. Caitie and I were talking a couple of weeks ago about how a Muslim is as likely to become President of the United States as an atheist is. Any by likely, I mean extraordinarily improbable during my lifetime, and I think that this is true: to the establishment, an atheist is as apparently dangerous as the Muslim. One of the mercies of being an atheist is that we bear no external signifier of our (lack of) faith, which makes it very easy for us to fit into WASP society. I am curious if the attacks that Muslims faced, particularly after 9/11, would be visited on the visible atheist; I've never seen a President attempt to deny the citizenship of a Muslim based only on their faith, but George Bush Sr. once said that he didn't know "that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots."
Despite patently disagreeing with Caitie's take on the origins of rationality and ethics (which we can maybe address later!), it is a wonderful, yet seemingly rare, to be in complete agreement with the theist as an atheist, as the key point is entirely sound: reason must be the /only/ guidepost by which the path of law, ethics, and justice is tread.