Mneme has asked some tough questions about how I got to where I am. In order to answer that, I need to talk a little about where I was.
She’s right to say that I was a very angry atheist for a long time. A friend once said that it wasn’t so much that I didn’t believe in God as that I was very angry with God. And there was a lot of truth to that. I remember standing out in thunderstorms daring God to strike me down. I remember writing essays (bound, signed, and numbered for maximum pretentiousness) about how belief in God was irrational, self-destructive, and anti-human – and giving them as “gifts” to my friends, who are all people of deep faith. I remember telling them over lunch that I couldn’t possibly be friends with religious people because they were irrational and destructive – right after they’d spent the morning helping me move. I remember arguing that my faith in my understanding of reason could not be considered faith because it was reason, which was the opposite of faith. When my friends pointed out that they didn’t appreciate me stomping all over their beliefs, I remember trying to dodge behind the “well, I’m speaking about religion in general – it’s not my fault if that shoe fits your individual foot, so you shouldn’t be offended” trick. (What a load of crap.)
I was an angry, irrational, inconsiderate jerk. And I very much regret all of it. I had no business treating people like that, or being so obstinate about it. Youthful mistakes, yes, and certainly my mental illnesses played a role, but I still made choices I shouldn’t have and did and said things I had no right to. I was an ass.
It really started when I read Rand. I met a guy in college who was very into Ayn Rand. He was smart, articulate, and funny. At first he was a friend of a friend, but we hit it off very well and soon he was one of my best friends. We used to take these long meandering walks through the neighborhood after midnight, talking for hours about all the stuff college kids bat around so passionately: the meaning of life, the existence of God, politics, philosophy.
He talked a lot about Rand and how her ideas had changed his life completely. I admired his confidence and the clarity of his ideas. So I read “Atlas Shrugged”, and like many other young people it hit me like a sledgehammer. It was like the little voice in my head that had always told me “You’re better than them, you’ll show them someday – they’ll see, they’ll get theirs for not seeing how you’re better” had just found confirmation in a book. Now I knew why I was better, and I could prove it, and all that stuff about myself that I’d cherished and everyone had tried to drill out of me was actually good and sacred.
At first I was actively opposed to religion, just like Rand. I wanted to “crush the infamous thing”. I told myself all my attacks on others’ beliefs were really for their own good, and for the good of the world: it dovetailed nicely with the evangelical mindset I was brought up with, and it gave me an excuse to feel and act superior. I was saving them from their “souls”! I was shining the light of sweet reason in on their dark, superstitious lives.
Except I wasn’t. For one thing, while I am lucky enough to be very smart (even brilliant on a good day), I am basically the village idiot in that circle. My family is a bunch of geniuses: people renowned in their fields, rising stars already burning bright and ascending fast. They’d never say so, because they are all far too decent to brag (and indifferent to that kind of competition). And I don’t want to give the impression that they tolerate me despite my relative lack of intellectual heft, because honestly it’s more like they tolerate me despite my frequently being a colossal ass. They have no interest in comparing brainpower — “they care about that like they care about interstellar dust”, to paraphrase Parker. What matters to them is who you are as a person, not your IQ score or your bank account or your social standing or other meaningless nonsense.
They understood their faiths (and mine) better than I did. Still do. They tried to make some sense of my Rand obsession, but given their better critical thinking skills (and less emotionally compromised judgment) they couldn’t really make sense of it. I think of my transition from evangelical Christian to Objectivist fanatic as essentially trading one “missed the point” emotionally stunting and hyper-judgmental cult for another. Instead of worshipping a stern judge in the sky forever separating the sheep from the chaff, I worshipped a Russian immigrant who condemned her protege to impotence for breaking off their affair. Tomato potato.
But one reason concepts of absolute morality (like my parents’ brand of evangelical Christianity, or Objectivism) fail is that there are always cracks in the facade. As an atheist I’d learned to delight in obsessing over odd minutia like the story of Christ condemning the fig tree, or Lot’s response to the mob that wanted him to let them have their way with his angelic guests. That cuts both ways. My friend was convinced that the best way to save our society from its irrational ways was to hasten its inevitable collapse – something like the way Morpheus justifies killing all those poor security guards who are just as trapped in the Matrix as he was once. And the more I looked at Objectivism, the less sense it made.
I never could quite understand Rand’s assertion that ragtime music was necessarily a more rational and emotionally healthy choice than say, Led Zeppelin. Or that while a woman certainly could be President, an emotionally healthy woman wouldn’t want to be. And I couldn’t reconcile her love of science and reason with her refusal to accept that smoking causes cancer – even after she lost a lung to it.
Add in learning that Rand was stubborn, unstable, and deeply manipulative in shocking ways, and it came to me that my idol was clay well past her knees. Even she couldn’t live the way she said everyone should. And while I grant that no one’s perfect, it’s not compelling to say “do as I say, not as I do” like that.
So I stopped being an Objectivist. No more meetings, no more newsletters, no more periodic re-reading of “The Fountainhead”. But I was still an atheist, and still pretty militant about it: religion was going to destroy us all, no question. But there was no need to try and destroy it. Its influence faded over time. Given enough time, it would just fade into obscure corners of our culture – and good riddance to it.
Here’s where the transition gets fuzzier. One of my weaknesses is that I hold on to the wrong parts of my past. I hold on to the hurts, the slights, and the obstacles I couldn’t overcome. I remember my failures (when I see them as such), and all the good stuff goes into a box marked “Okay, That Happened, Now What?” I don’t hold on to the stories of how I beat the odds and triumphed over adversity or became a better person: they’re like items on a to-do list that get deleted as soon as they’re checked off. Been there, done that, moving on.
I can’t point to a particular moment or even a process when I started accepting others’ faiths. I don’t recall how I got here from that angry, abusive place I was in for all those years. Here’s what I think happened, but it may well be a narrative I constructed after the fact – if the past is another country, mine is more often Narnia than Norway.
I started hanging out at That Other Place. I think when I first got there I was still in my “moderately militant” phase: less “crush the infamous thing” and more “we will inevitably evolve beyond this nonsense”. I loved that place, and the people I met there. Still do, for the most part.
But one thing that plagues unmoderated forums like Radio Paradise is trolls. Some people would rather call scorn and derision “style” and wield it like a cudgel on anyone they disagree with or think less of. Some people just enjoy wreaking havoc – as Alfred said, they want to ”watch the world burn”. And they tend to make the whole place less enjoyable as a result.
So i started arguing for more civility. Not restraint imposed from outside, by the owners of the site or by some self-appointed forum cops, but from within: self-restraint. The recognition that others and their views deserve as much respect as we expect for our own. I believe that practicing that self-restraint (something text-based interactions make easier than real-time face-to-face interactions) would make a huge difference: it might not stop the true trolls, the griefers and Jokers, but it would keep a lot of foot-in-mouth moments from escalating into full-on flamewars. And I believe that if we focused on the idea and not the adherent, if we worked on disagreeing without being disagreeable, we could get a lot farther both as friends and as intellectuals. Civility is a powerful force.
But it’s hard to have any credibility as a voice for self-restraint and respect for diversity if you don’t walk the walk. You can’t really say “hey, stop saying all Republicans are evil” if you’re also trying to sell the idea that all Christians are deluded. Either the logic works or it doesn’t, and in both cases it very much doesn’t. The brush is too broad, the strokes are too sloppy.
Besides, if religion is already on its inevitable decline, why push it? And does it really make sense to think that one day everyone will come to realize that there are no gods, that the world will one day be as monolithic in atheism as it never was in theism? Of course not. There will always be religious people. As soon fight the tide as fight people’s need to find meaning and order in a chaotic world, and the infinite ways they find to fill that need.
I stopped thinking I could prove there was no God. I couldn’t even construct a decent argument to shut my father up, much less someone smarter. I was all hat and no cattle, really. I tried to bolster my arguments by reading Bertrand Russell’s “Why I Am Not A Christian”.
And I couldn’t stand it. Russell gave his book the wrong title: it’s not so much “Why I Am Not A Christian” as “Why Christianity Is Laughable and Stupid”. It’s not a defense of or explanation for his atheism so much as it is a condemnation of Christianity. It felt petty and mean-spirited to me, like a mockery of everything millions of people held dear – and for no better reason than the fact that he didn’t agree.
Mneme took me to her church: a community church, intensely and directly involved in issues of social justice. It was full of bright, articulate, passionate, creative people who had a deeper commitment to the fundamentals of their faith (love, compassion, justice) than to a narrow, rigid interpretation of the rules. They took “even as you have done unto the least of these” and “love your neighbor” very seriously, and very joyfully. And not once did anyone there even look at me funny for being an atheist. It didn’t matter to them that I didn’t share their faith. As happy as they would have been to share it with me and see me find the same joy and meaning in it they did, they completely respected that I had chosen a different path.
(Maybe this isn’t a narrative. I don’t know that I’m getting the order of events right, and I’m not even sure it matters: the strata are muddled, the carbon-dating confused, but the pots and shards are still there.)
It floored me. It was like I finally understood what Mneme and J and all the others had been showing me and telling me all along: that even though we all grew up in different flavors of the same kind of rigid, form-over-function, letter-of-the-law fundamentalism, that wasn’t really what it was about to them. What we’d been taught growing up wasn’t what Christianity was about at all. It wasn’t about judgment and arcane rules and rituals observed for their own sake. It was about community. It was about consciousness raised to a joyous art. It was family and passion and love and commitment. Open arms and open doors, the new wine in a new skin, no more whitewashed tombs or Pharisaical autocratic condemnations.
It made me miss my old faith. It’s not foxholes that make me wish I still believed in God. It’s loneliness. I grew up with the church at the center of my social life, and some of my fondest memories are things like potuluck socials and church camp and Christmas pageants. (Not Easter. I wasn’t a morning person.) I was tempted to convert back, honestly.
I started realizing that there was more to Christianity than so-called “fundamentalism”. I didn’t really know my former faith as well as I thought I did, and many of the vices for which I’d so vigorously condemned the whole concept of religion really only applied to a narrrow and fringe-y interpretation of Christianity followed by a dwindling number of hardcore radicals. There was a way to practice Christianity that truly respected the idea of building His kingdom here on earth. There were Christians who started out in a very different place but wound up where I aspired to be, and that meant that Christianity couldn’t be a purely malevolent force. If through faith these people could be motivated to such good and joyous works, then how could I just condemn faith out of hand?
I couldn’t. It took a while to put that into practice. I had to remind myself time and again to take a step back, pick a smaller brush, and control my strokes more carefully. The problem with the Phelps clan isn’t that they’re Christians, or even that they’re radical fringe wackaloons. It’s that they’re bigots. Plenty of people are Christians and even radical fringe wackaloons without being bigots, so why drag them into it when the bigotry is the problem? The problem with the Republican party isn’t that Republicans (or even conseratives in general) are all control freaks bent on imposing their will, it’s that the party started pursuing a “engage the radical elements” strategy a few decades back and got themselves hijacked by the social conservatives they taught to organize. (That last is Mneme’s analysis, by the way, not mine. Unless I’m remembering it wrong, in which case the errors are my own.)
But eventually it sunk in. My head is thick, but not entirely impermeable. (Close, though.) I can’t expect space without granting space. I can’t even prove the sun will come up tomorrow or that 2+2=4, much less that my way is the One True Path. So where do I get off putting others down for what is ultimately just a different form of faith than my own?
