Shedding of the burden of God

"I do not believe in God. I believe in cashmere."
Fran Lebowitz

A bit of history is made today, as a "Good Without God" billboard appears in Chicago, and other cities as well, paid for by a coalition of secular groups. The news story in the Trib (self-serving commercial: The Jewish Atheist is honored to be one of the few blogs listed in the newspaper's "The Seeker" religious section) drew literally hundreds of comments, as hard-core believers on both sides vented their spleen. It was fun to watch the religious folks trot out the same tired nonsensical arguments and squall like babies at the questioning of their magical world.

Good. I am heartily in favor of anything that brings atheists together and openly questions the fantasies of smug believers, as rational humans have occasionally been able to do since ancient times, usually not without getting tortured or incinerated for their doubt.

But atheism now has its own billboard, if only for a few weeks, while billboards spewing religious BS litter this beautiful land of ours. I wish it were the other way round. I think a life without God, prayer, and obsessing over the Bible is a much better life! I should know --- that’s how I’ve lived.

Over the centuries, God has gotten excellent PR and marketing. When the times required it, the Torah God was supplemented with a nicer God. As humans evolved, so did their concept of God. I wonder if there’s a connection.

But God’s dark side is still on record, and a lot of people believe in it, because it panders to their darker instincts – to exclude, to persecute, even to destroy the Other, the unbeliever.

Many people just walk away from this kind of – and often all forms of – organized religion and quietly live their lives as secular humanists. Unfortunately, this is no longer enough. Religious fanatics and fundamentalists are now empowered to destroy whole societies.

Pushing back - hard

Two consistent themes in my writings have been outreach and conversion. I admire the brilliant works of Dawkins, Dennett and Harris, but I can't help wondering how much of it is “us talking to us.”

We must somehow muster our considerable intellectual firepower and focus it on the actual rollback of the influence and prestige of religion in public life. Otherwise we will be engulfed by orthodoxy’s relentless advance.

We’ve got to be better marketers, better evangelicals. Specifically: We should stop arguing that God doesn't exist -- assume he doesn’t -- and show the benefits of adopting this point of view.

What does it mean to shed the burden of God?



First, and probably most important, is the time, energy, and financial and other resources that we save (think of churches paying taxes!) and redirect to improving our lives and those of others here on Earth, as well as life for generations to follow.

Even in itself that's a lot of hard work, enough to fill a lifetime. Just think how much more effort believers could devote to it if they weren't wasting so much time praying and carrying out religious rituals.

I wish you could witness the zeal with which Orthodox Jews swab their shelves with hot water on Passover, lest a single molecule of leavened matter remain. Please don't mistake me: I do not mock these people. I feel a little sorry for them, and I marvel at the reasons they give themselves for spending their lives in this manner.

I so sincerely wish that they would disown these irrational practices and rededicate themselves to improving life on earth. But too often the opposite is true: rigorous religious practices co-occur with and even cause bad behavior on earth, and that is most unfortunate.

Psychological and spiritual benefits

Second, when we shed God, we reap significant psychological and spiritual benefits.

Prayer and worship are submissive, childlike behaviors that require us to believe (or, perhaps even worse, to pretend to believe) old legends and fantasies. No more of that!

These ancient texts were the products of human hands and of their times...so no more spinning the texts to uncover profundity that isn’t there. They’re just ancient texts. If you like, find a good translation and read it. But let’s move on!

Big Guy gone

Even better, one very large, invisible, irrational, meddlesome, arbitrarily-giving-and-taking-away Character is going to be gone from your life. There'll be no more worrying about what God wants, what God thinks, what God's plan is for the world or for you, whether God will cause things to work out for you or not, what God meant in this or that Bible passage.

If one is exceptionally lucky in life, and gullible, one may attribute one’s success to God, thus attracting hordes of believers who speak the same God-language and want so desperately to believe. One may then become even more successful – again, it’s assumed to be God at work. The Social Darwinists of the last century made a philosophy out of anointing the wealthy and successful as God's chosen.

People with middling to bad luck are on the minus side of the God equation. They devote a lot of energy to justifying their situation as being in accord with God’s whims. I bet they don’t enjoy religion as much as the lucky, successful few. Thanking God for your good luck and attracting like-minded believers is fun. Rationalizing misery is less fun.

I have not spent more than five minutes in my life worrying about what God wants. I have devoted my life to living my life, for better or worse. I have not wasted it in futile imprecations and contemplation.

Admittedly, prayer does work – but, for reasons I've pointed out elsewhere (benefits of chanting, toning, and meditation), not in the way that the pray-ers think it does.

Conversion???

Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I really think it’s possible to get people to openly shed the burden of God, starting at least with the doubters. One should not dismiss a priori the notion of humanistic conversion. Religious conversion is a well-known phenomenon. Why couldn’t it go the other way?

After all, people do renege on very deep and long-standing commitments like marriages or jobs. As in the dissolution of other relationships, each person may have to teach him/herself to set aside the old superstitions in his/her way (some may take all of five minutes).

But I'm convinced that it remains within the human ability to do so, despite all the centuries of repression and programming.

No more worshiping human beings

By the way, we've got to also shed the burden of worshiping human beings. There have been magnificently good human beings and hideously bad human beings, and members of both groups have believed in God.

However, as we know, a few got it right, and we've built on their insights. There is no need to worship them for having these insights, or for regarding these insights as profound, when in fact we have gone well beyond in matters of spirituality, psychology, and morality.

So if Jesus or some other demigod is your imaginary best friend, you might want to replace him with other, more relevant, contemporary exemplars, even if they're dead. What's important is their reality, as well as their relevance to you and what you’re trying to achieve.

Existential anxiety

Finally, shedding the burden of God enables us to adopt alternative, ennobling responses to existential anxiety.

The anxiety of accountability

To me it's humiliating to use religion to off-load personal responsibility. Disclaimers like that's “the way God made me,“ "God only gives us...,”and many other such copouts move the line of personal responsibility far away from where it should be: the individual.

I think such expressions are worse copouts then “I snapped,” “I don't know what came over me,” and other, similar expressions, in which the person at least admits that the undesired response came from within his/her own brain.

To a humanist, it is empowering and ennobling to be able to say that God is not responsible for who I am and what I do. (This, of course, does not exclude other copouts, such as “my parents,” “my genes,” etc. Even atheists are allowed some wiggle room!)

Anxiety about chaos

Here's where shedding the burden of God is another real plus. Those who believe in a God who intervenes in human affairs find themselves twisted into all kinds of philosophical knots trying to explain why God does bad things to good people, as well as many other incongruencies, e.g., the Holocaust. As Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine has observed, "the nicest thing you can say about God after the Holocaust is that he does not exist."

Many times, things happen because...they just do. "Nothing is certain," said G.K. Chesterton, "but uncertainty." Woody Allen: “God may be an underachiever.” And so on.

A lot of the chaos throughout history seems to have been driven by religious belief itself, with people having visions of this or that Goddess, or Kings consulting this or that oracle. The idea that there’s an intelligence behind all this is really absurd – except that a lot of people take it seriously.

A little control

Controlling what we can control... accepting what we cannot...having the wisdom to know the difference -- one of my all-time favorite piece of wisdom. And we don't need God to make it happen. It is human beings and their free will (there -- I said it!). It is we human beings, who will, one individual at a time, accomplish the above three tasks.

It can take a lifetime. It is a very high hurdle to leap spiritually, but again, it is a lot more ennobling than praying to some parent figure to ordain things the way we want. Then when he doesn't, people spent a lot of time rationalizing that. But as Marge Simpson said to Homer, “God is not your personal concierge.”

Balance and chaos

The universe contains both balance and chaos. Certain mathematical quantities are the way they are...because that's the way they are, not because God fixed them that way. They may look like neat numbers, but then, they’re our numbers. Even as innumerate a person as I...am able to observe that these neat numbers are to the base 10 (and we have 10 fingers!). Would they be as neat in any other base-number system? Just asking.

Also, there may be alternate universes in which nothing happens...in which neutrinos just fly about and matter never forms.

But -- at least from our human perspective – we have a universe which is both orderly and chaotic. Fortunate things happen. Unfortunate things happen. Nothing happens. Oftentimes we have no idea why. Life is often unfair, nice guys often do finish behind SOB's.

We gain absolutely nothing by "giving it to God." Maybe the use of such poetic words (this is not a literal giving, as with handing money to a cashier) is some sort of song, a kind of stimulus that makes speaker and listeners feel good, in a mutual moment recognition of our relative powerlessness.

Pushback

But when such religious language is taken as statement of objective fact (and remember that certain texts, such as the Torah, are 100% “song” and 0% fact) and forced on the rest of us, it's time to push back -- not just by writing books that enable us to talk more eloquently to each other (we’ve already got plenty of intellectual ammo)...but by actually asking believers (or at least doubters and pro forma performers) to consider life without God.

And that means having the courage to accept the world as it is. Far more ennobling in my opinion, than all the praying and begging with no guarantee of an answer.

Anxiety about death

This brings us to religion’s most powerful draw: the fear of death. I am reminded of the old football adage that when you elect to pass, three things can happen, and two of them are bad. The same goes for the belief in reincarnation or a religious hereafter. In fact, three bad things can happen.

The good thing that can happen is that each individual can make the most of this life, for which one does not need God, prayer, ritual, or attention to any supernatural entities or metaphysical phenomena whatsoever.

The first bad thing that can happen is that, as described above, one can waste a lot of potentially productive time in the performance of worship, prayer, and religious rituals.

The second bad thing that can happen is that a person whose faith is not strong – is not subjectively real and consistent over time -- may find him/herself trapped in a lifetime web of hypocritical and deceitful behavior, attending religious services and pretending and professing to believe, all out of a quite understandable fear. Such people are forced to act falsely and ego-dystonically.

The third bad thing that can happen is the worst of all: the faith isn't strong enough. The person dies in terror (unless heavily medicated), unable to believe when it counts the most.

Atheists in foxholes

I firmly believe that “there are no atheists in foxholes” is a canard that’s used to yoke the military and religious cultures together. They already have the same ideological foundation, since both require the same cultic obedience.

For me to cease to be an atheist, either in a foxhole on my deathbed, would be a repudiation of my entire life.

Life

What's the answer to death? Life. Be there for each moment (there are whole bookshelves on this subject). If you're not spending it the way you want to spend it, be aware of why.

Be aware that your thoughts and body 20 years from now will reflect your health practices and thoughts today (old Hindu adage).

Let each moment and each person be your teacher. Accept unfairness.

Read Roger Rosenblatt -- he says all this better than I. But that's life. That's how we defeat death.

So the shedding of God is the shedding of a huge spiritual and psychological burden. We are ennobled, empowered, and re-energized to live our lives with more integrity and more dignity. Knowing that God has no hand in matters, we resolve to use our freedom wisely and to realize that morality and justice are created not by messiahs or deities, but by individual human beings.

And we get to work.
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Alan M. Perlman is a secular humanist speaker and author -- most recently, of An Atheist Reads the Torah: Secular Humanistic Perspectives on the Five Books of Moses. For information, go to www.trafford.com/06-0056.