Friday, January 16, 2009

Atheism on the Bus

About a decade ago, while I was living in the Puget Sound area, I entered the “Poetry on the Buses” competition—an annual event in which poets and would-be poets compete to have their poems posted in and on Seattle buses. My poem, “Lilac Festival,” was among the winners, and so for a time it could be read by commuters on their way home from work. The poem, which I’m still rather pleased with, was an attempt to capture my memories of the Rochester lilac festival, which I attended every spring as an undergraduate student at the University of Rochester. It runs as follows:

In spring, at a carnival of lilacs and balloons,
of purple-peppered hills and pollens
that glisten on the tail of the bumblebee,
a sun-blond boy with ice cream lips watches
lovers who walk with steps that make the widows nod,
and girls in college jerseys
who flash their smiles in passing, over their shoulders
like petals tossed by children playing love-me-not.


The Poetry on the Buses project has always struck me as a great alternative to using bus walls—a kind of public space—for paid advertising. As a commuter, I’d much rather read a contest-wining poem than a soda slogan. Or worse, a religious ad.

Living where I now live, I don’t get much of a chance to see bus advertising (the bus system in Stillwater is run by the university and is advertisement-free), but I do see billboard ads often enough—and with some frequency the billboard space has been leased by one religious organization or another. One popular campaign (which apparently also does run on the sides of buses) features an all-black billboard with white lettering, the message signed by “God.”

The presumptuousness of this is only matched by the banality of the messages themselves—things such as “Have you read my #1 bestseller? There will be a test,” and “Think it’s hot here?” and “Let’s meet at my house Sunday before the game.” I can only imagine what God thinks of a bunch of religious slogan writers more influenced by Madison Avenue than by any deep sense of the divine, attributing their pithy messages to the infinite and transcendent mystery that lies at the heart of reality.

Now atheists are in on the game. And rather than taking their cue from the Poetry on the Buses project, they are firmly aligned with the Madison Avenue approach: Come up with a pithy message that simply can’t do justice to the deep philosophical issues to which it gestures, and then slap it on a billboard or a bus. But at least they aren’t attributing the products of their merely human sloganeering to the divine. I suppose that’s an improvement.

Thanks to a good family friend, I have a New York Times clipping about the atheist bus campaign in front of me, featuring a picture of a London double-decker bus with the world’s best-known atheist, Richard Dawkins, posed in front of it—trying (it seems) to look dapper. The atheist message on the bus reads as follows: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

The picture and the message were the first things I saw as I unfolded the clipping. And this fact gave me an opportunity to really experience first-hand the importance of context. Before reading the article itself, before coming to see the slogan in terms of the context out of which its creators were writing, I responded to it in terms of my own context.

My context is a progressive religious one. I live in the hope that the universe is fundamentally on the side of goodness, rather than being “pitilessly indifferent” to it as Dawkins maintains. And I see, in my inner spiritual experience, evidence that this hope is not in vain despite all the horrors in the world.

What does the atheist slogan on this bus mean to someone like me? As I read it, I find it jarring. Not because it’s offensive, but because the first sentence is so incongruent with the second. Given what I mean by “God,” I wouldn’t follow up the first sentence with “Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” I’d follow it up, instead, with something like the following: “So the crushing horrors of history will never be redeemed, and those whose lives have been shattered by suffering and loss and brutality, and who have no prospects of transcending their miserable condition in this life, should just give up hope.”

Not that this would fit on the side of a bus.

But, of course, for me “God” refers to that reality which, if it existed, would fulfill what I call in my book “the ethico-religious hope”—that is, the hope that the universe in some fundamental way is on the side of the good, so that when we live out lives lovingly we are actually becoming attuned to the deepest reality of all.

Perhaps the most important exponent of this hope in American history was Martin Luther King, Jr., who articulated it in terms of his conviction that “the universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship. Behind the harsh appearances of the world there is a benign power.”

In fact, King believed that embracing this hope was essential for practitioners of nonviolence. “I am quite aware,” he said in a 1957 speech, “that there are persons who believe firmly in nonviolence who do not believe in a personal God, but I think every person who believes in nonviolent resistance believes somehow that the universe in some form is on the side of justice. That there is something unfolding in the universe whether one speaks of it as an unconscious process, or whether one speaks of it as some unmoved mover, or whether someone speaks of it as a personal God….And this was one of the things that kept people together (during the Montgomery bus boycott), the belief that the universe is on the side of justice.”

And so, when I read the atheist slogan on the side of the bus, here is what I read: “The universe probably isn’t on the side of justice. It’s just as pitilessly indifferent to the good as Dawkins claims in his book, River Out of Eden. When evil shatters human lives in Rwanda, leaving people utterly broken until death, there will never be for them any redemption. It will be permanently true that it would have been better had they never been born. And in the world in which we live, such life-shattering events can happen to anyone, including you. And if they do happen to you, don’t look to the transcendent for hope, because there is none to be had. Your life will be decisively stripped of meaning. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE.”

This absurd juxtaposition of messages might usefully be contrasted with one offered by philosopher Walter Stace, who before becoming interested in mystical experience was very much an atheist in Dawkins’ mold, but with an important difference. In his famous essay, “Man Against Darkness,” Stace discusses what he thinks is the demise of religion in the face of science, but he doesn’t present his atheist picture of the world as a reason to “stop worrying and enjoy life.” Instead, he presents it as a grim truth that we need to confront. It is, in effect, one of the painful discoveries of growing up as a human species.

In Stace’s view of things, the universe doesn’t care about us. Those of us who die in despair and hopelessness will have lived lives without meaning, and no cosmic redemption can be hoped for. The truth as Stace sees it this: There is no God. Now brace yourself and try to make the best of things.

But I suppose that wouldn’t make for a very good marketing campaign on the sides of buses. Too grim. If there’s anything Madison Avenue teaches, its this: you don’t sell a product by claiming that life will be more miserable with it than without it.

But here is where differences in context become relevant. According to the New York times article, “the seeds of the Atheist Bus Campaign” were sewn by a comedy writer named Ariane Sherine. Sherine saw a religious ad on a bus and, when she went to the associated web site, was informed in the materials there that she and her friends were doomed to an afterlife of eternal torment because they didn’t have the right beliefs about God.

When God is portrayed as a fierce tyrant in the sky who roasts those who don’t believe the right sorts of things, atheism can seem refreshing. It becomes a liberation of sorts. In fact, this point was made beautifully long ago by the Greek scholar Plutarch.

Plutarch argued, in an essay called “On Superstition,” that there’s a fundamental difference between belief in tyrannical gods that place harsh demands on human beings on pain of retribution, and belief in a transcendent benevolence that wishes us only good. He calls the former superstition, and reserves the term “religion” for the latter. And he thinks that atheism is far preferable to superstition. Better to think there are no gods at all than to live your life in terror that the gods will smite you unless you scurry to obey their every whim. The superstitious person sees every misfortune as an act of the gods, and is always looking for someone to blame: Who is it that failed to obey with sufficient alacrity? Is it the gays, the feminists, the ACLU—all those whom Jerry Falwell blamed for the 9/11 attacks?

Far better to be an atheist than to live in cowering submission, convinced that we’re all the slaves of some irresistible supernatural tyrant. This is probably at least part of what the mystic philosopher Simone Weil had in mind when she referred to atheism as “a purification.”

But Weil was not an atheist. For her, atheism served the import role of wiping away the gods of the imagination, the deities we invent out of fear and ignorance. She believed that in order to really experience God—the divine presence that appeared to her while she was in the grip of debilitating migraine headaches, and seemed to her “a presence, like the smile on a beloved face”—in order to experience this we needed to clear our minds, to make a space within our consciousness, a place of quiet waiting into which grace might then flood in. But our imagination is always filling up these spaces with deities of our own invention, leaving no room at all for God.

And for Plutarch, the deadliest and most sinister god of the imagination is the supernatural tyrant, the growling monarch who commands us to obey or pay the price. This is a god we must flee, for the sake of our very sanity. But fleeing this god of superstition does not require us to reject all transcendent hopes, to dismiss every mystical report, to scoff at Martin Luther King’s hope that the universe bends towards justice or at Simone Weil’s encounter with a tender presence on the far side of anguish.

And so Plutarch concludes his essay by noting how atheists, in fleeing superstition, end up “leaping right over piety, which lies between.” This message (which, by the way, gives this blog its name) still has resonance so many centuries later. The god that Ariane Sherine is rejecting ought to be rejected. It is the god of superstition. But it doesn’t follow that we ought likewise to reject the God of Martin Luther King.

Walter Stace was, in my judgment, wrong to think that science has decisively refuted the existence of such a God. While nothing in our experience proves that the God of religion exists, there are deep and potent intimations of such a God in the most profound of mystical experiences. And, as I argue in my book, there are philosophical reasons to believe in deeper orders of reality than we encounter in ordinary sense experience—reasons that mean we don’t need to dismiss profound religious experiences as mere delusion.

We are free, instead, to make a different choice: to live in hope, to live as if the reports of the mystics are true, to embrace a worldview in which the deepest of all human longings is satisfied: the longing that the universe, in some fundamental way, cares about the good.

If we do, then perhaps we really can stop worrying and enjoy our lives.

4 comments:

  1. dear Eric,
    I know that it could seems strange for you to hear from me, after a long time passed since the last time we met, on a comment on your post. But this is life and the two of us, I am sure, enjoy it the way it is...unpredictable. Now I was quite willing to talk about this atheist bus initiative with someone, and curious to know your opinion. Reading the long letter you posted on the topic made me once more certain of the rightness of old latin said "omnia munda mundis" that is: everything looks clean to the clean people. Your religious idea is beautiful and I would say desirable. However, let me say that although I do not have a clear point on the bus story, I am sure that the advertissment was not conceived for your kind of God, which is ... so to say anomalous. As a matter of fact the world out there is plenty of so many Gods and Goddesses and Deities and Saints and Devils, Heavens and Hells, Angels and Demons. All these ... entities are nothing but the creation of the worst part of human being's mind. And they do not help us to gain any cosmic redemption (which you mentioned, but I do not have a clue of what it can prctically be), actually what they do is blaming us and loading us with sins. This dark side that we all possess is magnificated and sublimated in the religious thought of all the Gods above mentioned. The priests advertise their religions all the time and in any possible manner. This is the first time (for what I heard) that the atheists do a promotional campaign against religions. Furthermore, if you would consider the Gods and Devils of our religions you would surely understand why the atheists support the concept of "enjoy life" as opposed to god exists. I am an atheist, not an agnostic, an atheist. Gods are ideas, among the many that humans have created (wheels, pancakes, atomic bombs, etc..), extremely dangerous (well..atomic bomb is worst I admit it), so it must be rejected there cannot be middle ground. It is a matter of political issue. The priests use this idea for sucking vital energy from the mind of people only for their material wealth and power, a huge, enormous power. It is the most incredible brain washing operation ever conceived in human history. I am sure you are well aware of how they do and which results they obtain. Now, against all this incredible "devil's work" some ironical atheist bus in London and Barcelona is a droplet in the ocean but is something.
    A big hug

    Carmelo

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  2. "My context is a progressive religious one. I live in the hope that the universe is fundamentally on the side of goodness, rather than being “pitilessly indifferent” to it as Dawkins maintains. And I see, in my inner spiritual experience, evidence that this hope is not in vain despite all the horrors in the world."

    The universe is not, reality is. For the universe is matter. However, the nature of evil is that it consumes itself- evil cannot exist without good, or it will collapse, while good can survive without evil to prop it up.

    “So the crushing horrors of history will never be redeemed, and those whose lives have been shattered by suffering and loss and brutality, and who have no prospects of transcending their miserable condition in this life, should just give up hope.”

    Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment. Hope is in vain- only action truly matters. For only by acting can we change the world.

    "so that when we live out lives lovingly we are actually becoming attuned to the deepest reality of all. "

    I am good because it is right, not because it metaphysically benefits me.

    “the universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship. Behind the harsh appearances of the world there is a benign power.”

    And he died. And only part of his dream was fullfilled. People still fight for it.

    "but I think every person who believes in nonviolent resistance believes somehow that the universe in some form is on the side of justice."

    Great. Try it against opponents who don't believe in justice and nonviolence doesn't work. The Communists, the Nazis and the libertarians proved that well enough.

    "“The universe probably isn’t on the side of justice. It’s just as pitilessly indifferent to the good as Dawkins claims in his book, River Out of Eden. When evil shatters human lives in Rwanda, leaving people utterly broken until death, there will never be for them any redemption. It will be permanently true that it would have been better had they never been born. And in the world in which we live, such life-shattering events can happen to anyone, including you. And if they do happen to you, don’t look to the transcendent for hope, because there is none to be had. Your life will be decisively stripped of meaning. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE.”"

    Stick together citizens for in this world, we are all we have. Forget your fear and hatred for your fellows for you need them as much as they need you. We can make a better world- one where people don't have to worry about tradgedy and suffering because we deal with.

    But to do that, you must face up to the horrors that can happen, that will happen and might happen due to your actions. You must not become so self justifying you cannot see. You must accept that the fate of others is your responsibility as well, and it is a terrible burden to bear.

    And yet you must do so. Never forgot, above all, you might be wrong. For if you act with self-righteousnes and bulldozer over others fears the effects might horrific. You can redo the million killed by Stalin... or the million who died because we thought we could simply take apart the USSR.

    "Instead, he presents it as a grim truth that we need to confront. It is, in effect, one of the painful discoveries of growing up as a human species."

    The good news- no one cares how you have sex. The bad news? We need to care for other people on the planet.

    "In Stace’s view of things, the universe doesn’t care about us. Those of us who die in despair and hopelessness will have lived lives without meaning, and no cosmic redemption can be hoped for. The truth as Stace sees it this: There is no God. Now brace yourself and try to make the best of things."

    Why does meaning matter? Why does redemption matter?

    "If there’s anything Madison Avenue teaches, its this: you don’t sell a product by claiming that life will be more miserable with it than without it."

    Like Hell?

    "When God is portrayed as a fierce tyrant in the sky who roasts those who don’t believe the right sorts of things, atheism can seem refreshing. "

    All Gods are like this, except the ones that watch humans like we would watch lab rats.

    "and belief in a transcendent benevolence that wishes us only good. "

    And to do that he has come up with a set of rules...

    "But it doesn’t follow that we ought likewise to reject the God of Martin Luther King."

    Except atheists reject both for the same reason.

    "Walter Stace was, in my judgment, wrong to think that science has decisively refuted the existence of such a God."

    You are right- logic did so long ago.

    "there are deep and potent intimations of such a God in the most profound of mystical experiences. "

    I can change how I see the world with just allergy meds (the side effects are drowsiness, which combined with typing and other things...)- I don't think it is tough to see explanations for mystical experiences.

    "
    We are free, instead, to make a different choice: to live in hope, to live as if the reports of the mystics are true, to embrace a worldview in which the deepest of all human longings is satisfied: the longing that the universe, in some fundamental way, cares about the good.

    If we do, then perhaps we really can stop worrying and enjoy our lives. "

    And give up on those less fortune because it will all work out for them?

    "This is the first time (for what I heard) that the atheists do a promotional campaign against religions. "

    I believe anti-clerical campaings have occured before- however, campaings to eliminate religion by persusian are new.

    "(well..atomic bomb is worst I admit it),"

    Hey- they give us new ways to fight fires. The Soviets showed the way, but Greens here didn't like the idea of using them so... cavilarly.

    "The priests use this idea for sucking vital energy from the mind of people only for their material wealth and power, a huge, enormous power. "

    You have been reading Ignersol, haven't you :)

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  3. Hi, Im from Melbourne Australia. I came across your book yesterday in my favourite bookstore.

    For a completely different understanding of Real God as Indivisible Conscious Light please check out these related references.

    www.dabase.org/Divhscrt.htm

    www.dabase.org/dht7.htm

    www.dabase.org/kneeoflistening.com

    www.dabase.org/realgod.htm

    www.realgod.org

    www.dabase.org/tfrbklih.htm

    Plus what about the Sacred Scriptures of the rest of the Great Tradition of Humankind, all of which are now freely available to anyone with an internet connection.

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  4. Samuel--I hardly know where to begin addressing this great jumble of interesting ideas, undefended assertions, impassioned preaching, and perplexing asides.

    Let me focus on what I find most interesting and important--to wit, two of your comments: first,your statement, "I am good because it is right, not because it metaphysically benefits me"; second, your question in response to my concluding flourish, asking whether living in the hope of redemption means we should "give up on those less fortune (sic) because it will all work out for them".

    Both of these comments touch on the question of how religion and ethics are related--a question that is both fascinating and extremely difficult. Like you, I am deeply drawn to Kant's idea that an action has moral worth only if it is done out of respect for what is right. If you do the right thing for any other reason than because it is right, Kant thinks your action lacks moral worth.

    But how does this point connect up with the prospect of living in a universe which does or does not care about the good on some fundamental level? No simple answers here. Kant has his own views, and these views are interesting and intellectually challenging. He argues that morality in this sense is only possible on the postulate that there exists a benevolent and just God. But I will not explore his arguments for this view here.

    What I want to do is clear up some possible points of confusion. If Kant is right, then you aren't really being moral if you do what is outwardly right but for reasons unrelated to its BEING right.

    I agree with this. Hence, my view about the fulfillment of the ethico-religious hope can be stated in the following terms: when you do the right thing because it is right--that is, when you are truly acting out of respect for morality--you are in tune with the fundamental nature of reality, which cares about the good for its own sake.

    If you care about the good for its own sake too, you are aligned with the cosmos on a deep level. If, however, you do the right thing IN ORDER TO GET YOURSELF LINED UP WITH THE FUNDAMENTAL NATURE OF REALITY, you are paradoxically going to fail to realize your aim, because your motive will be at odds with the deepest nature of reality.

    Put more simply, the ethico-religious hope as I conceive it is the hope that the universe IS a certain way, not that I will gain certain metaphysical benefits from obeying moral laws. What makes it an ethical hope, rather than a self-interested hope, is precisely this: it is a hope that is separated off from self-seeking motives, a hope that is about what would BE best rather than about what would be best FOR ME.

    It would be good IN ITSELF were reality fundamentally on the side of goodness, if those who value the good for its own sake (divorced from all self-serving motives) were in tune with the deepest truth about the universe. If we care about the good for its own sake, then we should care about whether or not reality embodies this good or not. If we care about the good for its own sake, we would HOPE that the universe in fact does embody this good. Not because it is good for us, but because it would just be objectively good.

    Your second comment is one I touch on in my book, and so I won't dwell on it here--except to point out the following: Suppose I know that, were I to break little Davey's legs and arms and verbally abuse him until he felt like he were worthless, it ultimately would NOT crush him--because there are good doctors who will set the wounds and oversee his physical healing, and good therapists who will heal him emotionaly, so that eventually he will be good as new and his life will still be one that is well worth living.

    Does it follow from any of this that there is nothing objectionable about perpetrating these horrors on Davey? Does it follow that, were I able to spare Davey these horrors by intervening before someone else commits them, there'd be no reason to intervene?

    Of course not. If evils are redeemed by a transcendent good, they remain evils. And if we care about the good for its own sake, we would stand against these evil even if we lived in the hope that they would eventually be redeemed no matter what.

    Furthermore, as Simone Weil puts it, "The fact that a human being possesses an eternal destiny imposes only one obligation: respect. The obligation is only performed if the respect is effectively expressed in a real, not a fictitious way; and this can only be done through the medium of Man's earthly needs."

    In other words, even if there is a redemptive good which offers a hopeful eternal trajectory for every human life, it is still true that we have a duty to care about and respect one another; and the only way to carry out that duty here on earth is to care about each others' earthly needs.

    What your comment shows, however, is that my rhetorical flourish at the end, in which I referred back to the atheist message on the bus and tried to appropriate it in a new context, opened me up to potential misinterpretation.

    "Stop worrying and enjoy your life" can be taken in different ways. Neither the atheist bus campaign, nor I, intend it to mean that we should stop worrying about the suffering in the world and just enjoy ourselves as if no injustices are going on. Rather, what we intend to say is that we should stop obsessing about our eternal destinies.

    Atheism frees us from such obsessions by telling us that we don't have an eternal destiny. The universalist religion to which I ascribe does so by telling us that our eternal destiny lies in the hands of a perfect benevolence, a reality that will not cast anyone into "hell," a reality that has both the will and the resources to redeem EVERY human life.

    Even if the atheists are right, and every project we pursue for good or ill is ultimately swallowed up by oblivion, it still matters what we do in this life. Why? Because, as the new atheists will tell you, our earthly existence can have meaning if the character of that existence doesn't decisively alter our eternal destiny. Even if there is no heaven or hell, even if what we do in this life effects nothing but what happens in this life, it still matters.

    Likewise, even if the universalists are right and every human life is redeemed in the end, it still matters what we do in this life. It matters here and now. It is, in a way, an advantage of both atheism and religious universalism that they force us to stop obsessing about how our actions will impact our existence beyond this life and start focusing on how our actions impact this life, for ourselves and for others.

    There is much more to be said about these issues, but I will stop with that.

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