“I do not believe in God.” I cannot count the number of times in the midst of a social gathering I have been met with that declaration. I do not know why it is said to me. I do not go about proclaiming I am a theist. I do not go about in liturgical attire. My clothing is not redolent with incense. The small pendant cross on my chest is always concealed under my shirt such that unless one has x-ray vision it is imperceptible. Perhaps there is a celestial being hovering above my head with a placard that reads: “Complaints here.” There may be something to the latter. We do each project a certain amount of psychic information about ourselves, whether one names that “giving off a vibe,” or emanating an aura. I am not about to dismiss this idea. Perhaps I do indeed send out a subliminal message that I am a theist. Perhaps there are swarms of people out there with a type of theist-radar. I shall leave it to a someone interested in parapsychology to test that theory.
The other item of note about the declaration of non-belief is its tone. It usually bursts forth as a declaration of independence. It is presented as a type of manifesto: I am not bound to a higher power—presumedly other than the randomness or the order of material evolution. It says I am a free-man, and I owe no allegiance to a being or to a community that tells me what to believe, say or do. It is usually almost gleeful in its deliverance, the asseveration of an adolescent fledging. Interestingly it often followed by a rather apologetically delivered “Well, I suppose I am an agnostic.” To which I am always tempted to say: “Are you an agnostic or an atheist? Pick a side.” Ah! But there is the blain that reveals the irrationality of the stance. Has this atheism or agnosticism been thought out or is it merely a reaction? Is it a reaction to at some stage in life being forced to go to church? Is it a reactive dislike for the discipline a faith in a higher power commands? Is it a reaction to the infantile notion that scripture, doctrine and creeds are to be taken literally? Is it, for whatever reason, a reactionary rebellion against an ecclesiastical person or institution?
Most of the species is not given to reflect upon the higher or deeper aspects of our existence. It can be a daunting and complex task. We seek simplicity and surety. It is troublesome to be confronted by wonder or doubt, which are really only two sides of the same coin. There are enough troubles in life that one may well be inclined to not want another. But doubt and wonder are how we grow in knowledge, and growth in knowledge always brings us to our unknown. The unknown brings us to the need to reflect, analyze, experiment. Unknowning brings us to humility, and humility to wisdom. We can react our way through life. The world is in tatters because so many today merely react to stimuli, and so few reason, reflect, analyze, consider, and so come to humbly understand self, other, world. Reflection is a task that demands method and discipline. For all our lauding of rationality we tend to be flotsam and jetsam in the sea of life because we have lost the sapience for those very items of psyche that anchor us to the full scope of reality.
To the declaration of atheism I have been on occasion inclined to ask: “What if all the doctrines and rituals of religions are but symbolic statements and actions reflecting the working of the human psyche, items projected out from the psyche in symbol form so that the individual can grow healthily into who he is meant to be? What if these teachings and actions are simply subliminal formats to initiate the individual into the varied stages that life demands we traverse in search of fullness of self? What if all religion is code, not about the nature and structure of a god, a heaven or a hell, but for allowing the individual a safe space to retreat from the everyday press of the transient cares of life, to release the ego, to surrender the assorted masks we wear, to relax the pounding reasons of mind, and to bask in the absolute surety of one’s value, one’s purpose, one’s meaning?” That absolute surety is the primal necessity of life. Reason and its sundry -isms may provide direction and purpose, but both that direction and purpose will fail to sustain in the crises that the progress of life hurls at us because they are contingent upon nothing more than our reasoning.
We think that life ought to be rational, but we fail to see that which we consider rational is merely our notion of rationality. Life is not simply rational. We can after “the fact” dissect it and place its bits and pieces into an order, but that is not the same as its progression into “the fact.” Reason, our treasured rationality, is merely one way of navigating the everyday, the superficial, the commercial world of engagement and exchange. Life, however, rests upon a field of irrationality, upon a field of pure freedom, creativity, inspiration, upon a spiritedness that rises up from wells unknowable and moves us where “it,” and not we, decide. It is such that breathes forgiveness and humility into life and thusly makes it truly human in a manner foreign to reasonable man.
To name this primal field irrational is itself a rational judgment, a value judgment. Reason looks upon this enigmatic field, this nebula of not-conscious material, that keeps pulsing to intrude into its world and dubs it something other, and hence irrational. That pulsing and scintillating field is not irrational except in that it is not subject to our everyday rationality. It has its own reasons, its own logic, its own purposefulness, and it directs the conscious world toward its ends. It is evolution, creativity, freedom, integration. It is life at its roots. It is a network of powers with meaningfulness and ends, and so with personalities. Because it is itself a community it works to create community from personal wholeness to the cosmos of interwoven parts. It constantly pulses forward its trajectory, and when conscious, rational man rejects it or frustrates it in order to maintain a comfort zone for his own ego, it fights back.
This vital field beyond our everyday consciousness of things and our rational tools of navigation speaks in myths, in arts, in symbols, in those items we are so swift to name and to discount as irrational. Yet they constitute the very language, the very logos, that navigates life toward its rightful end so long as this language is understood as coded information that defines rather than a collection of meta-physical definitions. They are not objective truths. We are met with revelations of meaningfulness. They constitute the founding subjective truths, the truths that work to constitute one as a subject.
It is of interest, although it is not surprising, that an individual who can be judged intelligent and accomplished can be also quit avoidant of such deeper truth, such more profound levels of reality. It almost seems that a compacting of energy upon the daily practicalities of life and profession is a compensation for the ignoring of the summons to look more deeply, to hear more profoundly, to sense for intensely. The profundity from which life emerges, into which it arches is in itself as terrifying as it is wonderous. Ego quakes at the thought of it. Ego knows it is simply one of its fleeting constructs, a scaffolding for a more substantial form of being individual, of becoming a person well integrated into self and world. Thus, ego rallies its forces and ignores it, and in so doing substantiates its own inferiority, its own fear.
Our lauded rationality not only lethargically seeks to hide us from the vital most forces at the heart of life, in its ephemerality it confounds us with divisions. It may wag its head at myths, and arts, and sacred narratives, at rituals and the doctrines of religions, and dub them subjective phantasies. Yet, by placing the world in a neat and tidy order it divides things up in thousands of ways that are artificial, that are human artifices, fabrications. Ultimately it files everything under pleasurable or painful, good or evil. Such divisions do not exit outside the conscious rational mind. Life itself is a unity of being. That which is judged to be good or pleasurable is hinged on one item: “me”—even if the “me” is expanded into something that is “mine,” be that family, party, nation. This rationalizing “me” cannot abide a God because were there a God he would not allow evil or suffering. But what if, as some holy men of the East have taught, reality is God experiencing everything that can possibly be? What if it is not the case that bad things happen to good people, but simply that life happens? The world evolves, grows. What if we are not given to judge life, but rather it is life which judges us? Is that not the notion behind every tale of a cosmic judgement, a divine judgment?
The world is a living entity. Like every entity it evolves and grows, and such does not happen without change. Change is rarely without realignment and adjustment, movement and friction. The ancient Greeks espied this dynamic and tension within man and opined it was because he was a composite of life forms—plant, animal, rational being. He had three animating principles, three souls—sentient, concupiscent, rational. They overlooked one, and we do as well. We neglect that before we were vegetation or animal we were tellurian. We were earth. We are earth. Like the cosmos, of which it is but a cell, the earth has a soul, a life principle. We do not consider it because its days are aeons and epochs whose vastness escapes our withering grasp. Rocks live. Waters live. Everything in its own time and its own space is alive and forms part of a singular and living whole of which we are simply transient tellurian parts whose supreme role seems to be to be reflective of it all, and so morally responsible for it all.
They that would dismiss the necessity of God for life think not that life itself requires for its well-being an absolute. If we dare play at definitions, God is the absoluteness of life, and therefore of its meaning and value. We once were taught life is worth living because God has made it. Catechisms once said the purpose of life was to come to know God and to love and serve him. God was the guarantee of life and its meaning. Evil and sin could be endured because God was there to protect and heal in providential love. God was the meaning of life. It was in a sense seen that God was life and therefore life was sacred. There was an ultimate surety to existence, an ultimate value to being. Attempts to replace this absoluteness of meaning and value with an intellectualized ideal or a moral code will all in a crisis ultimately fail simply because ideals are our intellectual constructs, moral codes are our moral codes, and we are never unfalteringly intelligent, or purely ethical, or unfailingly moral. We fail our ideals constantly and continuously. Neither we nor any of our devises can reach the status of absolute. Any principle of action we concoct, any ideal we set up upon a pedestal, is as fallible and frangible as our hearts, and minds, and souls. God is the sole principle of existence that defines existence from beyond existence and thus can substantiate it. God alone resolves the tension of being and becoming because God alone purely and simply “is” even as that divine “is-ness” escapes every attempt to conceptualize it. Thus psyche, that life force that daily makes us and holds us together, brings forth images in myths, and art, in ritual, in coded statements that seek to allow us to become immersed in the absolute incomprehensibility and immeasurability of our being. They that see here a reference to baptism are correct. Baptism is an immersion, a being plunged into a vision of personhood, into a superordinate personality that creates the space for the initiate to expand towards the parameters of his depth identity, a depth given by the Spirit at the root of psyche and an identity given in the role and person of Christ.
As for them that reject the idea of God because they have been wounded by some form of ecclesiastical hypocrisy—without sanctioning the lack of morals in any life—it must be kept in mind every church community is a coming together of recovering addicts, souls addicted to sin, to an unhealthy sense of self-interest, and in search of a healing discipline. Does no one pay attention to the fact that every gathering of church begins with a confession of sin? The idea that any church is a room full of holy people is as preposterous as the idea of a God who sits somewhere above the stratosphere on clouds of angel heads. Anyone who thinks with such naivete is woefully unprepared to face the reality of self, other, or the world.
The hypocrisy of the church, both at the level of institution and the level of the individual is the constant torment of the church. It is an evil, and like all evil it is contagious, spreading its venom in every direction. Unfortunately, the larger any organization the more inclined are its members to excuse themselves of moral responsibility because the organization itself is accepted as oriented toward the good and so compensates for the individual’s failings. We have here a descent into a mass anonymity within which the individual’s sins are supposedly not only hidden in the good intentionality of the mass, but in some sense excused. It is the great lie. It is individuality and individual responsibility wiped out by the anonymity of the mass. The sin of the individual does not count, ought not to count, because the thrust of the whole is toward the good. That psychotic mind set has pillaged countless souls of value, meaning, health, and God. That is the reason every member of the church needs to kneel before the great icons of faith and humbly bewail and confess the manifest sin and wickedness that plague every heart and soul. We would need no great Saviour, no merciful God had we the power to keep our glowing codes of conduct, to absolve ourselves, to become who we are from depths and ages incalculable who we are meant to be. Myths, and stories, and rituals and coded doctrines rise up out of the depths of us to turn our rationalizing heads and our contriving hearts toward that power working in us that wills us to be something more than our hearts can ask or our minds imagine. It is a process of imaging the image hidden within us from the dawn of time. It is the process of Spirit working in the psyche. Given the incarnation perhaps we ought to say it is the Spirit working as the psyche to make substantial and real the Imago Dei dwelling in as the definiens of us. It alone connects us to our past, to our roots, to our destiny. Without it we are lost to ourselves, our wholeness, our health, our sanity, our world. Without it we are rootless, and at the mercy of any and every touting of meaning or purpose that flutters by us.
One might opine the abandonment of God and the disciplines of religion are but psyche preparing the stage for a new era? One might conjecture that just as two millennia ago Jupiter and his celestial companions were abandoned and the cult of Christ arose, so today we face the coming of a new envisioning of reality and its meaning. If such a historiography is a possibility, we ought to reconvene in several centuries and examine the idea for its prescience. On the other hand we can today examine the psychology of the individual confronted with the press of technology, globalization and the failure of the environment and ask what if the abandonment of God and the disciplines of religion are related to the world’s descent into chaos and death? What if in neglecting those things reason deems irrational we have unmoored ourselves from the roots of reality and are careening ever faster into “war and rumour of war,” spiraling out of orbit with party against party, people against people, nation against nation, man against the world he once knew as his nurturing mother? What if a declaration of independence from God has real consequence—personal, social, cosmic? What if that apocalyptic beast set loose upon the earth is simply man untethered from God and faith?
The denial of God and of the cult that adheres to him in obedience and love is a rebellion against the culture which is perceived as flowing from that cult. It is in fact an act of frustration with Western life that has deflated the power of the individual, given question to the very concept of authority, and despoiled love in the celebration of unbridled sensuality and sexuality. Effete man strikes out at the heart and soul of the primal cultural figure: the almighty, the parental, the loving God. This weakening of the human spirit is not without magnetism. There coagulates a mass of the powerless, and in their mass they feel impowered, even as in that very mass they surrender their individuality, their individual hearts, and souls and characters.
This herd mentality with its mass anonymity grows out of a sense of powerlessness, insecurity, frustration, inferiority. True individuality and decisiveness have been compromised. The opposites that constitute every psyche drift apart. An inner tension is produced. Internal conflicts arise. Conscience and character are in flux. The herd with its mass anonymity offers solace and release from all this. The dark side, the shadow within, the powers we would not to deal with are ignored, and are subsumed in the comfortable self-righteousness of the herd. It is a systematic dissociation, a type of hysteria. The herd blindly believes its own lies because they protect it from seeing its uncomfortable truth. Thus, whatsoever its motives, they are good. If for whatever reason it should happen that the dark side of all this can no longer be hidden, the anonymous mass as a whole and in its every member will absolve itself on the grounds that it is about a higher order, a greater aim. They have become the herrenvolk. Yet, this lie will only add to the unacknowledged sense of inferiority that caused all this to manifest, and so with added tension the roiled mass will move all the more daringly to flaunt its powers, to demand it be heard, be recognized, indeed, be loved. This all may have begun when the individual felt flaunted by the world, by its world, but now having become the roaring mass it will be relentless until it conquers that world. Man shrived of the God that gives him meaning, value and dignity is man rootless and spiraling ever deeper into the hysterical. Could I paint a better picture of what it is like in hell?
Not every soul is lost to the herd identity. Yet, its mass and anonymity have a gravity that acts to catch others into its dark orbit. Even the moral indignation it may arouse plays into its power, defacing its critics with a sense of moral superiority, and therein undermining the appropriate adequation of reality. The self-righteousness of the mass spins out a false spirituality. It is a darkness that discolours everything it touches. One thinks of Dante’s Lucifer enthroned high in the carbonous centre of hell, beating his wings and causing a cyclone of wind and ice, a relentless storm wherein tempers run hot and hearts beat cold, the very antithesis of God whose sacred heart radiates light, whose pierced heart speaks forevermore of the inescapable conflict and woundedness that is humanity’s worldly truth. What if, like Christ, we embraced that brokenness, that cross, and lived it in its fulness? What if we accepted the fact that we are made up of conflicting powers that press for recognition and integration, and acknowledged that above them and beyond them we have an absolute definiens, the mark of a Saviour incarnate?
Postscript:
It was not my intention in the above to equate the body of them that name themselves atheists or agnostics with them that constitute the herd identity. My interest was to consider the correlation of the two in so far as the sense of alienation and frustration which lies behind the herd identity resides in many cases behind the rejection of organized religion and its God. The brevity of my examination does not give room for either the breadth or depth the topic requires. I write apercus not tomes. However, for a sake of balance I must acknowledge that the herd with its mass anonymity is not exclusively the club of atheist and agnostic. It is plump with theists. They are, as are all subsumed in the herd identity, frustrated with life, the station life in the world has given them, the station the world has given their life and their beliefs. They are angry with the world, and they blame the world for this its sin, its sin against them. They believe in God, or more accurately, they have a God. They do not so much belong to a God as possess one. We have here a retreat into the primitive, into the tribal mentality. The God of all, the God who is all-embracing, the God who is creative and forward-giving is not the God their hearts cherish. No. They alone have God. They are his chosen, the righteous, the faithful. They alone have the truth and have suffered for it, continue to suffer for it. They may be angry, but it is for God’s sake—so they earnestly feel. They read their sacred texts, and they see in them the justification of their own frustration and anger, the God of vengeance and judgement. They strike out to be the agents of this God. Thus, the world that opposes them, the heathen, the infidel, the other, the whomsoever happens to be not of this tribe must be put down, rooted-out, silenced, defeated, and if need be murdered. They are not the projections of a God graciously dwelling within and calling them to wholeness, rather their God is a projection of them, their frustration with their lot. This situation is basically antisocial if for no more complex reason than that they themselves have not arisen to sociality, they have not integrated self into the individuality a true society requires for functionality. Thus they are the mass, anonymous and amorphous, charging ahead on blind herd instinct. They have no inclination to reflect, consider, examine, to meet or to confront doubt or wonder. Such would only upset the false stability they have created to protect themselves against the pain the world has unjustly imposed upon them. Their stance and their God are their stronghold and defence. Unconsciously they know this, and if ever that knowing has an occasion to come forward, they repress it because they fear it. This makes them all the more resolute, and their anger now combined with fear makes them rage all the more fiercely. There is no external resolution to such a lethal combination of forces. The solution, the healing action, can come only from within, from facing the feared truth, the ignored shadow, acknowledging it, brining it to light. The process toward wholeness and growth then is not defense, not domination, but creativity, and that is never without friction, an openness to experiment and change, humility, forgiveness.