Thank god I'm an atheist II: Why I'm not an atheist.

Long list of "sorry"s to my friends who are atheists.  I can't define myself as an atheist.  Here's why:

(Caveat:  My arguments breakdown if you define gods as the quasi-religious political dogmas used to control the masses.  If this is God, then I am an atheist.)

The first and more simple of the two reasons is that I do not wish to define myself as anything.  I'm not an atheist, a Christian, a taoist, an existentialist, a feminist, or an anesthesiologist (I practice anesthesia).  I wish that I had a true passion about something (the devotion yoga for you Hindu enthusiasts) that would allow me to more or less pin my existence on, but I can't.  My personal identity is extraordinarily elusive as it is.  I can summarize my motives or "projects" as Sartre would have, but I can't summarize me; or at least I don't want to because summarizing sets you up for dismissal.  "Oh, he's an atheist.  I can't get through to him."  I certainly think that the standard definition of atheism carries a lot that appeals to me.  Feminism carries an enormous amount that appeals to me (standard definition is important; consider the definition of Islam or Muslim by a fundamentalist versus that of the other 99%) .  But I have to admit, as much as I like her, Simone de Beauvoir, a highly regarded existential feminist (she'd hate that I called her either), says a lot of weird shit.  Am I a feminist of the weird shit too?  I would even argue that I shouldn't say I'm not something.  I'm not a Christian but there are many non-dogmatic points that appeal to me.  (Isn't the initial concept a response to sin in Judiasm?  Wasn't the idea attributed to Jesus that we should forgive all "sin" and thus essentially eliminate the concept entirely?)  Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Islam all have appeal to me.  (Did you know that the original texts for Islam were a response to a lack of women's rights?  They urged that women be allowed to have rights to property and inheritance.  Those wild and crazy fundamentalist muslim feminists!)

Definitions are battleground delineations.  They absolutely have their place.  I am not a feminist, but I certainly believe in a large portion of what they symbolize.  When laid out on the line, I would call myself a feminist to show what I believe I'm not and to set my limits on what I can tolerate.  (Goddamn right that my daughter will have the same opportunities that I have/had.)  But, this blog is not a battleground.  Nor is my head.  So I'm not an atheist here or when when I'm alone on the shitter.  When I'm at my Scottish super-atheist friend's house, I barely resemble an atheist; when I'm at my highly religious father-in-law's house, I'm a militant atheist.

The other reason is more difficult to explain.  Most definitions of God invoke an image of a
supreme humanoid being that warrants worship.  By those definitions I am an atheist (the theory or belief that God does not exist).  But others suggest something ill-defined: the supreme or ultimate reality; an idol to be worshipped (to treat with reverence and adoration); the source of moral authority.  Given these definitions, I can't say I don't believe in "god".

Let's pause for a minute, however.  Outside the sphere of human consciousness, I am an absolute nihilist.  There is no morality, knowledge, being, truth.  These things are all human interpretation, perception, and construct.  If there is no one to touch something, there is no substance.  But this is not where we live.  My world is a conscious world so the fake truths it defines are true for me.  I believe there is a common point to reality and morality (see Common Morality; also a blog for another day).  I believe there is an ultimate irreducibility to our world.  And, even if there is not, I believe there is an irreducibility to our capacity for understanding which therefore becomes the de facto ultimate reality.  And I worship: I worship the idol of science.  I perform rituals on a daily basis (consider the known effectiveness of all we do in the OR; we know nothing as fact, we only know probability so we have our quarks and rituals to pretend to have some control over the uncontrollable).  I treat science with a reverence deserving of a deity.  

Identify with your disease

My guaranteed to read lead in is this: Fuck.

The origin of this lies in the fact that my "Patience" entry is the highest rated.  I am certain that it isn't the quality of the writing but the fact that the word "fuck" reveals itself in the first sentence and has two encores in the first paragraph.  Everybody loves the unnecessarily inappropriate.  I'd love to hear the top ten words that would get you reading (ear muffs everybody: fuck, shit, balls, cock; are you listening Google?).

Now that you've gotten this far, on to identity.  I don't know who the hell or what the hell I am so this will be an oft-treaded topic on this blog. I don't think I'll ever really know who this person who fakes my narrative truly is (there is so much redundancy and feedback in that sentence - I, I, my - I'm getting nauseous; I truly am a strange loop).  I refuse to read The Ugly Duckling to my daughter because I don't want to give her the false impression that we ever figure out who we are.    Maybe that's Buddha and Sartre's point anyway: defining yourself is succumbing to entropy (energy not available for useful work).  If I am what I am, the process is complete.  I am not available for useful work (i.e. the process of becoming).  I am a pinpoint.  I am stagnant.

But that is a topic for another day.  What concerns me here is identity and disease (there is a great book called Human Identity and Bioethics if you’re interested).  My god is the physical process.  I wouldn’t say physics per se because physics is a construct for understanding.  I simply mean that everything as we understand it is an infinitely dissectible set of processes: the unicellular organism driven by physical forces shares work with other organisms forming multicellular organisms that become increasingly more outwardly complex, but still driven by the same basic forces.  We are simple patterns of cause and effect (I don’t actually believe in cause and effect to be honest - blow your mind on this: Backward Causation).  Consciousness, free will, morality, spirituality are all versions of an uninterpretable chaos of physical processes.  I am that zygote in my mom’s uterus (just opened up a shit-can for the pro-lifers).

This means that we could not be anyone or anything other than our diseases.  Whatever the arbitrary classification of disease that my body will eventually degenerate into, that is me.  It is part of the process that is me.  If I were to define myself by the personality that emerges from the chemicals in my brain, I would have to define myself by the disease that shares the same chemicals, cells, and physical causation.  It is the ultimate Catch-22: you couldn’t live without the disease that’ll kill you.

The mini-van and the death of self

My wife won't let me buy a mini-van. I want one because it's spacious; it has little TVs that silence two-year olds; it can go the 80 miles an hour that I don't go beyond anyway; it allows for easy clean-up of the ill-defined baby particles that seem to make their way onto the floor and seats; and it has floor stow away things that serve no real purpose but are cool anyway.

But it's a no go. It's a no go because it marks the death of what we could be. Our future rock star selves. The one's that put the baby to bed at 7, arrive by plane to the Baja coast by 11, drink shots dripped through each other's ass cracks, and be home in time to film our American Idol audition songs before our baby wakes up. A mini-van marks the death of a dream. We are our parents. We are the middle class.

I am the worst perpetrator of this fallacy of identity. I am a writer even though my books and plays and whatevers haven't been written yet. I am a jujitsu master that can defend my family with Jason Bourne-like skill even though I haven't really committed to practicing the art. And I am a great husband and father because of these things I'm going to do, not the things that I am doing.

This is a big problem; a big, under-recognized problem. It is not the dreaming that's an issue. I believe possibility to be a great source of inspiration and productivity. It is the narrative we build - that thing we create to bridge the pinpoints of our lives into a false fluidity - that is the problem. Somehow with our perceived future weaves its way into our present and, in some ways, dominates it. We begin to think we are what we want to be.

Sartre stated that we are what we are not and not what we are. Utterly confusing but expected from a man who thought he was being chased by gigantic lobsters through his amphetamine haze. Confusing but insightful. We are what we are not: we are our projects, our expectations, our goals. We are not what we are: we are not our present selves but instead what we are working towards. To some extent this is healthy. If we cannot own our future selves in some way now, what would be the point of working towards anything? Sartre was a perfect example of how this can be healthy: he was striving towards something but actively doing something about it now. He was a philosopher and writer so he wrote everyday (enough for 20 pages a day for his entire lifetime). He was active. He lived his future in his present.

I don't think most of us are like him. We get lost in what we are not. I explain why I'm a writer instead of writing. I explain to my wife why I'm a good husband instead of doing what it takes to be one. I abstract myself from my present.

I'll be coming back to this idea of the present a lot. Although impossible to pinpoint, this now, this present, this whatever the fuck this is that we're truly living in is the only thing that's real. The past is misconceived, misconstrued, and misinterpreted. The future is undefined, unpredictable, and unsustainable. The present defines us. The rest is false narrative.

But fuck the mini-van. I'm getting a Porsche. It fits my Hunter S Thompson meets Bruce Lee persona better anyway.

Sartre: www.sartre.org/
Stow-Aways (love 'em): www.helium.com/items/785698-pros-and-cons-of-stow-n-go-seats-in-minivans