January 06, 2013
My Faith: A Confession
Justin Smith over at his website:
Different people, different closets. I don't quite know how to say it delicately so I'm just going to come right out and say it. I believe in God. Apart from periodic spells of foolish pride, I have believed in God all my life. Even during these spells, I did not so much cease to believe, as turn my back on what I believed.
As far as I'm concerned there cannot really be any concern that God does not exist. Even to see God's existence as a problem is to misapprehend what is at stake, since God just is the love, sweet and radiant, that charges through every drop and leaf and mote of the creation, always ready to be felt by anyone who is ready to believe.
God is not male, and I cannot say 'he', however tempted I am to remain with the conventions of my beautiful language and its beautiful tradition of devotional writing. But this is a relatively trivial corollary of the more important point that God is not a being, and so also neither a monarch nor a father nor a ruler of any sort. God is love, and I can keep my love of God and have my anarchism too.
Indeed, as I see it the two not only can but must go together. To believe in God, and to feel the divine love that charges through all of creation, is precisely not to bow down, but to rejoice. The great travesty of the history of religion, and the victory of its enemies, has been to bend the idea of God to the legitimation of earthly rulers, to convince people that God is like dad, or the king, or the tyrant, but more so, and that, conversely, these mundane potentates are little reflections of God. There is none of this in my love of God, which shines out of my encounter with creatures, God's creatures, that themselves have no power other than the power of their own growth and integrity, their own life, which is itself an expression of the same joy in God as my own.
To experience this joy is to know that the states of my soul and the states of infinite nature always fit, that each is an expression of the other, and so, that my death cannot be the end of anything, since nature, of which my soul was a modulation, a beautiful if dirty outcropping, will keep doing what it always does, and I, now only more obviously a convolution of nature, will flow along in streams and breezes and cosmic rays and will no longer be held up on this concern about the 'I' at all, about its finitude and its mortality.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 10:41 AM | Permalink
Comments
Chacun à son goût
Posted by: Félix E. F. Larocca, MD | Jan 6, 2013 11:00:21 AM
A courageous statement. But that "The hoarse-voiced goon at the sports match shouting about how Jesus Christ died for my sins" needs to be loved, too. That's what unconditional love means. No status seeking. Unconditional love requires you to tolerate the intolerant. It means "slaves obey your masters". It ain't easy. This guy is still engaged in some moral status seeking. But not much. He's on his way.
Posted by: Faze | Jan 6, 2013 11:26:02 AM
Anyone can believe in 'god' as long as they get to decide what the word means. I'm unimpressed.
Posted by: Mikeb | Jan 6, 2013 11:45:28 AM
I'm just too afraid of being dismissed as a vulgar, puffed-up fool to actually say anything here! :-)
Posted by: S. Abbas Raza | Jan 6, 2013 11:53:23 AM
I'm sorry, but this is meaningless drivel.
Posted by: Briano | Jan 6, 2013 12:28:18 PM
This is a great essay. It reminded me in some ways of the spirituality and love expressed by Phillip Deere in this talk. The original spirituality expressed by Jesus has been to a great extent lost through the wedding of crown and cross, "God on our side."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er843DDxmbU
Posted by: Louise Gordon | Jan 6, 2013 1:51:02 PM
Courageous stuff. However, I share the sense that the author has not really engaged with the implications of what he is saying. I am quite sure that, for example, a woman who is dying of injuries sufered during a gang rape will have a much more difficult time accepting that "love, sweet and radiant... charges through every drop and leaf and mote of the creation", especially because "the creation" includes the men who tortured her.
I basically mistrust anyone who can earnestly and thoughtfully say such things in the face of such evil. Not because of scientism or philosophical argument or any such thing, but because it is an inhuman thing to say in the light of what reality actually is.
Posted by: Joe | Jan 6, 2013 2:33:27 PM
Thanks for this. I, for one, feel reassured, having sensed for some time that atheism was becoming the New Enlightenment.
Posted by: John Ballard | Jan 6, 2013 2:37:36 PM
The problem is, you don't get to take the core message of the Gospels, which, when you read them, offer little to support this pantheistic conception of God.I'm afraid I read this as just an effort on the part of the author to distance himself from the derision of believers. I'm not a fool, I'm not a fool.
Posted by: Ken Pidcock | Jan 6, 2013 3:47:33 PM
Oh for Christ's sake. Just let anyone write what they really feel about God -- as opposed to what their opinion is -- and the author will either be criticized for treating real religion like a salad bar, or for dreadfully imperfect atheism aka "drivel." Will you please get that the writer is not writing philosophy here? Is not staking out a philosophically coherent position for himself?
Part of what a human being does is to have religious feelings. Many readers here would like to reclassify those feelings as superstitions. To those, I say you are trivializing a deep impulse, which is different than hewing to some idea of reason. You are, instead of being rational (a fantasy), struggling with a firm belief in non-belief, not to mention intellectualizing the numinous down to dust. I feel sorry for you -- the world is more beautiful if you let yourself experience what you need not explain.
As for religious people who believe their own orthodoxies set the bar for others -- well, this is only one way you resemble atheists, and not the only one.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 6, 2013 4:34:28 PM
Ah, but Smith says, I am a Christian. Is it unfair to hold him to having expressed support for an ideology universally understood to involve the proposition that faith - belief in divine agency requiring no justification - is virtuous? (Can I say that I'm a communist while claiming to be saying nothing about property?)I spent many, many years identifying as Christian. I suspect that this (and the Muslim, etc equivalent) is common among nonbelievers. We connect with the values of a culture where good people are understood to be people of faith, and we see our identification as expression of respect for those values. We also weave stories like Smith's, though rarely so beautifully written.
But if we value honesty, we should be troubled by the realization that, by our identification, we are now contributing to the association of faith with virtue and conveying that understanding to the children of our communities. In my case, I found myself forced to accept that, if I do not believe that unjustified belief is virtuous (and I certainly do not), I should not identify myself as religious.
I doubt that Smith, with his language of puffed-up fools, is similarly troubled, but I hope that he someday will be.
Posted by: Ken Pidcock | Jan 6, 2013 6:21:00 PM
Well said, Elatia, and also Ken. The word "Christian" has been hopelessly contaminated over the centuries and, now thoroughly politicized within the U.S., carries so much baggage that it has devolved into something of an insult to its purported "founder" -- except, of course, Jesus did not intend to found a new religion and certainly did not support holier-than-thou attitudes among his followers.
Justin Smith is unsure whether to call himself a Christian and carefully qualifies his assertion in the final sentence of his piece. Christianity is not so much a belief system for him as it is an orientation to life itself.
I do not see a claim to virtue in this.
Posted by: Susan | Jan 6, 2013 7:14:20 PM
A woman who is dying of injuries sufered during a gang rape will have a much more difficult time accepting that "love, sweet and radiant... charges through every drop and leaf and mote of the creation", especially because "the creation" includes the men who tortured her.
If not the tortured, then who?
Posted by: Faze | Jan 6, 2013 9:01:01 PM
Was there some problem with my comment (I posted it twice, just in case)?
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | Jan 6, 2013 9:17:37 PM
I don't see Patrick's comment.
Ken, I also don't see where the writer is hung up on Christian virtue. Refraining from violence, avoiding personal dishonesty, keeping one's word -- all these and more are virtues according to most religions, for the reason we would all live better if everyone subscribed to them. Yes, faith is demanded of Christians -- but everyone who gets out of bed in the morning has had to have faith in something. If you are aware of God's presence, that awareness is a form of faith. If you believe in denying God's presence -- you deeply feel it isn't there, you cannot prove it -- that too is faith. We are talking about varieties of religious experience, to coin a phrase, here -- not about things that can be proven, or need to be.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 6, 2013 10:31:06 PM
"If you believe in denying [The Flying Spaghetti Monster]'s presence -- you deeply feel it isn't there, you cannot prove it -- that too is faith."
Haven't you been around the topic enough, Elatia, to know that's nonsense?... Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby. Atheism is a religion like abstinence is a sexual position. Atheism is a religion like bald is a hair color. Atheism is a religion like off is a TV station.
Posted by: billy | Jan 6, 2013 11:23:56 PM
Billy, I cannot consider these words of yours a refutation of the point I was making. Also, they are not your words but atheist boilerplate. I know that being an atheist takes no imagination, but please, on aesthetic grounds, try harder.
Try this. You have something unverifiable, yet you are deeply aware of its presence. It's at least an emotional reality for you. Simply because you are that kind of person, and professing otherwise is being untruthful, especially within the privacy of your own mind. Now -- someone you know is deeply aware of other circumstances, of certainties you don't feel compelled by, yet his belief in them is sincere, his behavior charitable, his mind well-exercised. Like you, he can verify nothing. Should these people be calling each other idiots? Probably not.
If you want to talk about idiots, I will cite Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut who observed he'd been up higher and out further than any other human and had yet seen neither hide nor hair of God. When you think of it, many atheist truth claims are not so different from that.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 7, 2013 12:34:40 AM
Meh.. To each his own. As long as I am not forced to believe it....
Posted by: Bill | Jan 7, 2013 4:10:18 AM
Might as well be talking (beautifully) about quantum fluctuations. In fact probably is.
Posted by: Stuart Mathieson | Jan 7, 2013 4:46:37 AM
Justin,
Beautiful and moving... thank you.
It is important, what you've said.
your friend,
morgan
Posted by: morgan meis | Jan 7, 2013 9:06:37 AM
Justin,
Thank you. Beautifully written. Deeply felt. Bravely told.
Posted by: Norman Costa | Jan 7, 2013 9:50:16 AM
Part of what a human being does is to have religious feelings
Elatia, I deeply respect you, so I don't know what could drive you to write something like that. Plenty of human beings experience no religious feelings whatsoever, and you know that, because you've read people who earnestly deny having the sort of experience you describe in your comments. Are they *really* somehow less than human, or deluded or missing some special faculty? I find such an attitude to be deeply troubling. It is mere steps away from classifying people as sub-human.
Secondly, it is odd to claim that there is some mode of "non-philosophical" discourse which is somehow exempt from ordinary standards of logical implication. If Justin says something, and it has a strange/absurd/immoral implication, then that counts against what he says. This is just a basic requirement of language-use, not any high-falutin' philosophical standard. People are therefore perfectly within their rights to ask him about those kinds of implications.
Posted by: Joe | Jan 7, 2013 10:24:38 AM
I invite readers to a 3-part article I wrote for 3QD, four years ago, "A Scientist Goes to an Ashram for a Personal Retreat - The Final Chapter."
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/03/a-scientist-goes-to-an-ashram-for-a-personal-retreat---the-final-chapter.html
It is the third part, and it is more conceptual and philosophical than the first two. Links to parts 1 and 2 are at the beginning of the article.
Justin does not need me to speak for him, yet I think some of the objections to his confession are more undifferentiated reactions to the broader subjects of God, faith, belief, and religion. Their responses are not to Justin's expression of his personal spirituality [he did not use the word 'spiritual' but that is what I understood], but to their own conceptions, and which are not what he was talking about. In short, they use his words to create a straw man, and then proceed to smack the crap out of it.
Dr. Larocca, ever the gentleman, found it sufficient to acknowledge, with simplicity, a difference in views, yet show respect for Justin as one who thinks deeply when he puts pen to paper.
I quote from part 2 of my article:
"How does all of this validate the views of someone who does not believe in a personal God, but who has a strong sense of being one with the universe and possibly losing a sense of self in the experience. The transcendent and the numinous can be accessible to the most materialistic of scientists, without positing the supernatural. At the same time, there is no reason to mistrust the same experiences in believers simply because they posit a supernatural source. The question is not, “Does God exist?” It's irrelevant. The question is whether believers and nonbelievers can rejoice in the same experiences and not denigrate the other's explanation as to the origins of very powerful human responses."
Posted by: Norman Costa | Jan 7, 2013 10:28:51 AM
Elatia, you were trying to blur the differences between religious believers and atheists, that atheists have a "belief in non-belief". And I was pointing out that with all your experience you should've known how ridiculous that statement is--it doesn't take any new arguments from me to illustrate that. If you want to defend someone's right to spout nonsense without getting criticized, go right ahead. But please don't drag atheism into it.
Posted by: billy | Jan 7, 2013 12:56:31 PM
Abbas: I still think some people are pretty awesome when they get puffed up.
Billy: I agree that atheism isn't a religion alongside others, but I wonder whether some of your stock analogies, rightly identified by Elatia as boilerplate, really help to make this point. Certainly, abstinence is not a sexual position, but it might very well be an expression of sexuality; depending on what the practitioner believes about it, it might even be experienced as erotically charged (think of Gandhi in bed with his niece). I can even imagine a master philatelist who comes to think that the most elevated engagement with stamps is to contemplate them and long for them, while eschewing the actual business of collecting and handling them. These examples in turn help us to conceive the possibility of a variety of religious faith that does not shy away from acknowledging the feeling of the absence of its object, and that therefore can easily look, according to the simplistic categories in terms of which these matters are discussed by the so-called new atheists, a good deal like atheism itself. This is, I take it, an important element of the apophatic theological tradition, about which Dawkins and other chatterers almost certainly know nothing.
Posted by: Justin Smith | Jan 7, 2013 1:21:35 PM
"Beliefs are merely tools. They don't have to be "true," they just have to work." - kc
Posted by: Kim Cascone | Jan 7, 2013 1:37:04 PM
"God just is the love, sweet and radiant, that charges through every drop and leaf and mote of the creation."
But does love exist outside a human standpoint? Why should it be applied to a leaf? And why should such a nebulous concept of love be called God and associated with Christianity (a creed that is very much rooted in the distinct time and place of its creation)? Nature, as seen on this planet, seems to be indifferent to concepts such as love.
Posted by: IA | Jan 7, 2013 2:13:51 PM
Thanks, Joe -- I like you too and enjoy your point of view. No human is sub-human, ever. People who don't have religious feelings are -- exactly that. The religious impulse is wide and deep and long, but it isn't shared by 100% of us. We love music, too, and like to leave our marks on surfaces -- except when, far less usually, we don't. When one speaks of very broadly distributed traits of a species, over millennia, I think it's understood one may be leaving some individuals out without trashing them. Many atheists have religious feelings, but take care not to incorporate those feelings into their world view. Atheists who are overwhelmed with grief or fear or who otherwise carry a load they find intolerable may well feel that "Where can I turn, but to The Lord?" feeling, but that is not how they live, that is not the light by which they see.
Billy, did Justin settle your hash? If so, good, because I hope not to argue with anyone who, based on misunderstanding, defends his use of a rosary of cliches to refute me. I think we "went there" in 2008, anyhow.
Justin, thanks for joining in. I don't think atheism is a religion like any other, either. But for those who are atheists owing to a commitment to rationalism, I think they are putting too much faith in rationalism, starting exactly with the assumption they are fully capable of it, or capable of understanding what the subjective experience of being a rationalist would entail. As we are -- still -- whole beings in whom unreason flourishes like it or not, the rationalist path will lead us only where we cannot really go.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 7, 2013 2:15:13 PM
Justin,
The faith you outline here certainly has a rich lineage among mystics in many cultures: love of God, love of all creatures for being expressions of the divine, contempt for religious orthodoxy, pacifism, egalitarianism. In fact, Western Christianity has a relatively impoverished tradition of mystical faith compared to Eastern Christianity, not to mention Sufism and Bhakti.
There is considerable beauty in the mystical variety of religious experience. As an aside, I wish to emphasize that love of all creatures need not pivot on God. It can no less proceed from a rapturous wonder in things of this world, an understanding of our common fate, of our shared suffering and striving and inevitable loss, taking us to a sense of love and compassion for all beings.
At first I thought you were laying out the faith of a Christian mystic like Meister Eckhart of Strasbourg or Julian of Norwich (as they may have articulated it), rather than stating your own. Brave and finely crafted as this piece is, I can't shake off the feeling that it's written by someone who admires the mystical idea intellectually but doesn't inhabit it — the work of an outsider who longs to be an insider. I find in it an excessively self-conscious sense of love, still too new and theoretical. I could be wrong, but I sure hope this doesn't herald your turn away from satirical, kick-ass moves on God's creatures like Tom Friedman, who once clogged your toilet.
Posted by: Namit | Jan 7, 2013 2:44:39 PM
Well, it's just everytime I hear something like "faith in rationalism" I cringe. I suppose the more rational response, instead of trying to get people to stop saying it, would be to change my reaction to it (by imagining they're talking about some strawperson rather than any atheists I'm familiar with). I'm not even sure why I commented, I barely pay attention to religious stuff these days.
Posted by: billy | Jan 7, 2013 2:46:23 PM
"God just is the love, sweet and radiant, that charges through every drop and leaf and mote of the creation."
Humans haven't a chance, being this disconnected from nature.
Posted by: Dave Ranningdd | Jan 7, 2013 6:06:09 PM
Made me think of the poem by Hughes Mearns. Does it really matter, this discourse between
believers and non-believers? I have done without "God" for 60+years. Has that affected my presence on this earth as a concerned human being? I'll let others be the judge.
"Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away..."
Antigonish, Hughes Mearns (1899)
Posted by: waqnis | Jan 8, 2013 11:37:46 AM
Thank you, Justin, for your words and your courage.
Desmond Tutu on G-d (excerpt from a dialogue with the Dalai Lama): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/07/god-is-not-a-christian-tutu-dalai-lama_n_2421553.html
Posted by: Meri | Jan 8, 2013 1:50:17 PM
Well, Justin, that gave me something to think about.
Maybe not a very deep comment, but arguably the best compliment a writer can be given.
Posted by: DrunktankDan | Jan 9, 2013 5:07:23 PM
I usually avoid these threads but the piece is written subjectively, not in any objective sense. It's hard to see if the objective criticism of the article holds any relevance. Hegel argued that an exposition between the two was mandatory or a prerequisite for further discussion:
"Objective religion is fides quae creditur [the faith with which one believes]; understanding and memory are the powers that do the work, investigating facts, thinking them through, retaining and even believing them. Objective religion can also possess practical knowledge, but only as a sort of frozen capital. It is susceptible to organizational schemes: it can be systematized, set forth in books, and expounded discursively. Subjective religion on the other hand expresses itself only in feelings and actions."
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pc/tubingen.htm
Atheism really hasn't caught on like it was tested, analysed and predicted to do so. Whether you believe in god or don't, an empirically verifiable measure of its relevance is the percentage of those that purport a belief and those who do not. Although he was derided in 1977 when he delivered “The Return of the Sacred”, Daniel Bell has been proven to remarkably accurate with his big picture analysis, especially with regard to the most modernised and scientifically informed country on the planet.
"And with his three biggest ideas Bell clearly got it right: 1) Marxism and the radical ideologies that had so stirred Europe in the early decades of the 20th century were thoroughly discredited among thinking people and would eventually die on the vine; 2) antinomian modernism and consumerist hedonism as a focus to one’s life’s energies leads to spiritual emptiness and an agonizing sense of forlornness in the world; and 3) America was ripe for a religious revival that would assume a traditionalist, even fundamentalist, cast in theology and morals."
http://www.sociology.org/announcements/rip-daniel-bell/
Posted by: Troy | Jan 10, 2013 5:50:18 AM
1) Marxism and the radical ideologies that had so stirred Europe in the early decades of the 20th century were thoroughly discredited among thinking people and would eventually die on the vine
Really?
Marx is taken more serious than ever, even by the liberal, corporate sponsored press:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1997/10/20/1997_10_20_248_TNY_CARDS_000379653
Atheism?
http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2009/06/atheist-nations-are-more-peaceful.html
Posted by: Dave Ranningdd | Jan 10, 2013 2:55:58 PM
Cheers Dave. I'm not sure what you are getting at with the links. My point was that Bell got it pretty much right with his 1977 forecast of rampant global religious revivalism, particularly in the US. Whether Marxism has died on the vine or is in its dying throes isn't the point, Bell made the statement 15 years before the Berlin Wall fell and a 1997 article in the New Yorker does little to prove its contemporary relevance among thinking people. Following the socialist upheavals in the early 90s there's simply no decent horses left to back in the communist stable.
Also, I'm not arguing either for atheism or religiosity or which is more peaceful (the comments under the article make a solid argument against the legitimacy of the findings) but rather, who would of thought in the late 1970s that atheism would not gather traction and religion would undergo such a resurgence? It's a crazy world.
Posted by: Troy | Jan 11, 2013 2:01:35 AM
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