Tag Archives: Bertrand Russell

Godless?

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At this point in my life, I think there isn’t a god or Higher Being out there 100% of the time. My renouncement of God is too fresh, and a major reason I felt relief at my unbelief was the end of the cognitive dissonance I experienced for so long. I don’t think of the universe as a god-substitute, somehow working with will and intention to bring people and opportunities our way. I truly believe that no one is in charge anywhere out there in the background of our lives.

Yet I considered the label “Christian atheist”… not because I do and don’t believe in God, but because I feel like I am an atheistic cultural Christian, akin to a secular Jewish person. Because I continue to be culturally involved in Christianity while I attend church with my family and socialize with predominantly religious friends. I still enjoy discussing (picking apart) the Bible, and I enjoy debating spiritual theories. I like this approach because as I laid out earlier, Christianity created me. The foundation of my life was centered around Christ. It greatly contributed (for better or for worse) to so much of my essence—my values, my morality, my language, my behavior, my tastes, my sexuality, my life choices.

Sarah Henn Hayward, Giving Up God, p.155

Although for most of the middle years of my life I would have called myself a contemplative Christian of one kind or another, I never really shared Sarah Henn Hayward’s sense of being a cultural Christian. I grew up as the child of a single parent, outside of any formal religion. My mother, a painter and sculptor, was an early example of someone who might today refer to themselves as spiritual, but not religious; and while most of my twenties were spent trying to find some kind of spiritual compass, the last place I thought of looking was within the Christian faith. Most of the time my adult friends were not Christian – some were militantly atheist – and I was rarely entirely at home in a church milieu.

Nevertheless, since my own “giving up God” experience over the last five years, I have experienced something of the tension Hayward describes. Like her, I found Christian language had become “infused into the air I breathed” (ibid. p.156), and it has been difficult at times to live without it. Appropriating another religious language from a culture far removed from my own would not have helped – long ago I discovered that, intricate and finely honed as it was, Buddhist language and iconography didn’t really  do it for me. Inevitably I do find I borrow technical terminology here and there, but that live electricity of a sacred poetry deeply embedded in my own culture is lacking.

The language of scientific materialism, while I tend to agree with many, if not most, of its conclusions, doesn’t do very well when it comes to the  phenomenology of spirituality. It is probably best left to those who use it in their daily work; in any case, stretched too far, it begins to sound like pseudoscience, after the manner of Deepak Chopra or JZ Knight.

To muddle on, as I have done over the last few years, occasionally using the word “God” in Paul Tillich’s sense of the ground of being, or Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura, occasionally repurposing bits of Scripture, occasionally filching Buddhist or Taoist phrases to use out of context, seems to be the best I can do; although even academic philosophers often seem to find themselves reinventing language to suit their own formal requirements – Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s early work comes to mind, not to mention Spinoza’s Euclidian complexities in his Ethics. In any case, I have no formal philosophical training whatsoever; and moreover, I usually find myself distrusting academic philosophy when applied to spiritual intuitions.

Perhaps I am doing the best I can. Certainly over the last year or so I have become more comfortable with what I can’t do in terms of language. I know that my writing can verge on the incoherent, but at least I feel as though I’m beginning to be able to say what I mean, to put words to what David Jones so memorably called “the actually loved and known”.

One life

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The question of personal immortality stands on a somewhat different footing. Here evidence either way is possible. Persons are part of the everyday world with which science is concerned, and the conditions which determine their existence are discoverable. A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be sceptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal, and that the organised energy of a living body becomes, as it were, demobilised at death, and therefore not available for collective action. All the evidence goes to show that what we regard as our mental life is bound up with brain structure and organised bodily energy. Therefore it is rational to suppose that mental life ceases when bodily life ceases. The argument is only one of probability, but it is as strong as those upon which most scientific conclusions are based.

Bertrand Russell, What I Believe

When I sit quietly, as I did this evening, in the soft breeze from the open window, with the sounds of the birds mingling with the street sounds – human voices, tyres on the road, a distant train horn – merely being alive is infinitely precious, its own stillness bright with presence. And yet I know very well that this one life that I have known is entirely finite; its perfect whatness would not be were it not.

Seen like this, death is a dear friend, as necessary to life’s loveliness as being born. What is there to fear? To dissolve in the end into simple light, the plain isness that underlies all things and yet is no thing? Not fearful, but just right; all things finding their duration as their place – and in that their beauty, and all the wonder that they are.

(See also my post earlier this year, Making friends with death)

Why?

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I realise that yesterday’s post may have seemed unnecessarily startling. “Atheist” is one of those words, like “evangelical” or “apostate”, almost guaranteed to produce a sharp intake of breath on the part of the reader. I apologise – but I did want to be definite, having prevaricated on the issue for so long.

Please don’t imagine that I’ve turned away from the contemplative life, or that I’ve decided to embrace some “There’s nowt but muck and brass, lad!” brand of materialism. I hope you’ll forgive me for quoting Sam Harris yet again:

I share the concern, expressed by many atheists, that the terms spiritual and mystical are often used to make claims not merely about the quality of certain experiences but about reality at large. Far too often, these words are invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and intellectually grotesque. Consequently, many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception. This is a problem, because millions of people have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical seem the only terms available. Many of the beliefs people form on the basis of these experiences are false. But the fact [is] that… [t]he human mind does, in fact, contain vast expanses that few of us ever discover.

And that is the problem – if it is a problem – I have had to face here. It is far too easy to read the word “atheist”, as I sometimes did myself in the past, and imagine someone for whom “all talk of spirituality [is] a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception.” I am not that man.

In fact, until the relatively recent extremes of polarisation set in, many of those we think of as archetypal atheists, like Bertrand Russell, had hearts open to experience beyond everyday consensus reality.

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river – small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory: And Other Essays (Routledge Classics)

I confess that having spent much of my life wrestling with spiritual insight on the one hand and unease with the concept of the supernatural on the other, I am profoundly relieved to be able at last to admit, to myself as much as to anyone, that atheist probably does come closer to describing my metaphysical attitude than anything else I can think of. I did consider using the softer “nontheist” (a term beloved of some contemporary Quakers) but I couldn’t get away from the sense that to use the term of myself was once again clouding the issue. I have to admit, though, that there is a passage using it, in Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart, that comes as close to expressing my own feelings at the moment as anything I’ve read:

The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God… Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there’s some hand to hold… Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves… Nontheism is finally realizing there is no babysitter you can count on.