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UPDATE ON ATHEISM
The late February edition of The New Yorker has a “Critic at
Large” piece by Adam Gopnik that reviews recent books by militant Atheists and
suggests that there may be more common ground between (at least some versions
of) religious belief and non-believers than what Atheist authors such as
Mitchell Stephens want to acknowledge. Quoting Peter Watson, author of “The Age
of Atheists: How we have sought to live since the death of God”, the article states
that “…we are divided not so much between believers and non-as between what
might be called Super-Naturalists, who believe that a material account of
existence is inadequate to our numinous-seeming experience, and Self-Makers,
who are prepared to let the human mind take credit even for the most shimmering
bits of life.” The article states that “most [Self-Makers] believe in something
like what the Super-Naturalists would call faith- they search for transcendence
and epiphany, practice some ritual, live some rite.” By the same token, Gopnik
observes that few “Supernaturalists” “believe in an omnipotent man in the sky
making moral rules and watching human actions with paranoiac intensity.”
My own view is that militant atheism is twin to militant
fundamentalism, whether the latter is of the Christian, Muslim, or other
variety. These evangelistic adversaries act as if they believed more strongly
in demons than in anything else, and go after each other with the fierce
concentration of exorcists. This would
make more sense if we really thought about God the way the “Two Thousand Year
Old Man” did in a Mel Brooks’ film, who told how “a guy in our village named Phil” was
worshipped by everyone because “he could break you in two with his bare hands.”
When Phil gets incinerated by a lightning bolt from the sky, the villagers
conclude that “there’s something bigger than Phil” and so religion is born.
I suppose that fear, a desire to placate unseen dangers
lurking in the dark, had a role in the development of primal religion, but I
don’t think “Super-Phil” theology is anything like the whole story. There is
anthropological/archeological evidence brought forward recently that explains
the origin of cities, not in the usual terms of economics alone, but as an
outgrowth of the craving ancient nomadic people felt for a
place to celebrate sacred festivals.
So great was their sense of gratitude at the miracle of their survival
that they just had to dance! Temples and cities emerged where the tribes
habitually gathered. In this account, religious belief was a byproduct of
festivity and community, not the other way around.
Even more ancient is the impulse reflected in the wall and
cliff paintings found in the caves at Lascaux and elsewhere. These drawings of
animals were, it is supposed, scrawled there by awe-struck hunters anxious to
illustrate their stories and express their amazement at the existence of such
large animals as Wooly Mammoths, and , even more, that such puny creatures as
themselves could successfully kill and eat them. If they were not utterly amazed, they should
have been! I have hunted deer every year since 1989, dressed in high-tech
insulated fabric, armed with a repeating rifle, and even wearing electric
socks, and have not killed a deer in all that time. These ancestors of ours
survived and multiplied with nothing but rocks and sharp sticks as weapons!
Don’t tell me they were not amazed.
From that primal amazement came the icons, and the dances,
and the sacred stories, and the periodic festivals, and the shamans, and
eventually the temples and the priests. If there was fear in it, it was fear of
proving unworthy of the joy, of presuming upon the abundant generosity by which
the animals renewed their numbers every year, of regarding their own prowess
and success as something other than a gift.
OK, the “Self-Makers” are right to say that Wooly Mammoths
did not present themselves at the mouths of cave dwellings and conveniently
drop dead. Of course they had to be hunted down and killed with great ingenuity
and skill, not to mention bravery. This is where the paths of skeptical
Supernaturalists and committed Self-Makers converge. Adam Gopnik says that the
unreligious humanists have “a monopoly on legitimate forms of knowledge about
the natural world,” which believers once controlled and now covet. That may or
may not be so, but the “Supernaturalists” have all the cool dances and chants
and the coolest old buildings.
Gopnik concludes his article with some speculations of his
own, supposing that the conflict between atheism and its counterpart will
simply disappear as the world grows more economically prosperous and pain-free.
That might be true for people like me, who might well have avoided entanglement
with religion altogether were it not for early experiences on rivers and in the
woods. But when my eight year old grandson (shown above), who is a master at video-game
technology, reminds me of “the time when we listened to the crickets,” he
sounds like a hunter to me, and like one who will always “search for
transcendence and epiphany, practice some ritual, live some rite.” In my
tradition, God has an affinity for such people, and will continue to haunt
their imaginations, lure them to liturgies, and provoke them to pray.
