What atheists and Jehovah’s Witnesses have in common

I’m thinking that the next time a Jehovah’s Witness knocks on Sam Parnia’s door, he needs to invite him in.

Now of course I myself have never done this, being a person who’s so theologically irascible I get irritated even when people say they’re going to pray for me (which I guess they’d better, if they’re right and I’m wrong). But the other day was, as I told my hospice volunteer coordinator at the end of our monthly “Faith and the End of Life” series, the first time I voluntarily took handouts from a Jehovah’s Witness.

It’s pretty interesting, what they believe. When you die, you’re dead (Yes! says my true-atheist friend). You just lie there in your coffin, waiting, to the extent that a dead person can be said to wait, that is.

Then along comes Jesus, and everybody, good and bad, gets resurrected. But here’s the rub: only 144,000 of them get to go with him back up to heaven. And what happens to all the rest of the billions of people? They stay here, on Earth, except that Earth is now a paradise and there is no death.

So it seems like we’d all better try really really hard to become one of those 144,000; because we’re going to be awfully crowded on Earth, not to mention all those bad people rubbing up against us.

But what does all of this have to do with Sam Parnia? Well, I suspect the Jehovah’s Witness will tell him his experiment, to see whether clinically dead people can report back what they saw when they were floating on the operating room ceiling, is a waste of time.

Dead is dead, until…

Baby belief

My rigorous true-atheist friend asks whether I think Vivaldi would not have written sublime music if he didn’t believe in the sublime.

I think he would have written sublime music, but not that music. I believe Vivaldi and Brahms and Mozart and all the others composed sacred choral music to pay homage to their conception of God.

She says (non-orthogonalicity notwithstanding), “Why not show a photo of a baby as a reason to be an agnostic rather than an atheist?”

They did, and do, seem like miracles.

We can believe, but we can’t know

You do realize that atheism and agnosticism are orthogonal, right?
That is, agnosticism is about what is knowable. The agnostic thinks that it is not knowable whether any gods exist.
Atheism is about what is not believed. The atheist does not believe any gods exist.
It is possibly (and extremely common) for people to be agnostic atheists — thinking that it is not possible to know if any gods exist while lacking belief in any gods.
Likewise, it’s possible and common to be an agnostic theist, thinking it is not possible to know if any gods exist, yet believing in the existence of one or more gods.
So, to try to explain why you’re agnostic instead of atheist betrays a misunderstanding on your part of what these words actually mean.

Since I believe people’s comments get lost on this blog, and since this one really made me think, I’m responding to it here. It’s from someone who calls himself scaryreasoner, and I admit he scared me a bit when I realized I didn’t really understand what “orthogonal” meant, apart from those wonderful geometry diagrams Tina and I used to draw.

But at least I’m in good company! Here’s a bit of transcript from a recent oral argument before the Supreme Court:

MR. FRIEDMAN: I think that issue is entirely orthogonal to the issue here because the Commonwealth is acknowledging -
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I’m sorry. Entirely what?
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal. Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Oh.
JUSTICE SCALIA: What was that adjective? I liked that.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Orthogonal.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Right, right.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Orthogonal, ooh.
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE KENNEDY: I knew this case presented us a problem.
(Laughter.)

If you look it up in a dead-tree dictionary, you won’t find a definition that applies, because, I believe, it’s a word that’s been adopted by programmers. Related, but separate, you could think of it as meaning.

I believe the point Mr. Scaryreasoner is making (I think) is that knowledge and belief are separate. As I wrote yesterday, “Thinking and believing are two separate spheres. You can’t think your way into God.”

My problem with his reasoning, though, is that I believe, to quote Scaryreasoner, “that it is not knowable whether any gods exist.” I don’t just think it; I believe it, as strongly as a theist believes in God. An atheist (forgive the triple negatives here) not only “does not believe any gods exist,” to quote Scaryreasoner, but (from the Random House dead-tree unabridged dictionary) believes “that there is no god.” I believe you cannot know this.

I’ve probably lost everybody here, but if Mr. Scaryreasoner is still reading, I hope he will reply.

And, coming soon, a reply to one of my most loyal readers about the symbol for atheism.

I need to touch the wounds

Andrew Sullivan is an intelligent writer who is also a devout Christian. I have to admit I have a hard time putting those two characteristics together – my automatic prejudice is that if someone believes Jesus was actually God, they just haven’t thought about it enough.

This in itself is stupid, I realize. Thinking and believing are two separate spheres. You can’t think your way into God.

Anyway, lately on his site he’s been hosting a debate between atheists and theists that’s fascinating; about what everybody thinks happens after we die. The atheists tend to be a bit arrogant, postulating, for example, that people who believe in an afterlife do so because they’re cowards, afraid to face their own death. But they’re also quite compelling, writing about how their belief in their own dissolution makes them more able to appreciate the lives they have; more eager to live good lives because they will only live on in memory.

Sullivan himself writes:

I have two intuitions about what happens when I die. The first is that I cannot know in any way for sure; and I surely know that whatever heaven is, it is so beyond our human understanding that it is perhaps better not to try an answer. The second is that I will continue to exist in my essence but more firmly and completely enveloped in the love and expanse of God, as revealed primarily in the life of Jesus.

I agree with his first intuition, except for the part about heaven, unless he means that heaven has something to do with how everything got started, the one mystery that atheism has no capability to explain. As for the second, if Jesus popped into my room right now, I’d have to agree. But I just can’t get there from here. My room is empty.

Why I’m agnostic and not an atheist

The big A

It’s funny, when you think about it, that people mark graves with “emblems of belief.” Why are we here? What happens when we die? Just look at the graves, and you can figure out what all those dead people believed about where to find them. Crosses? Find Jesus and you’ll find them. Wheels of Righteousness? They’re reincarnated, so you probably won’t recognize them. Crescent moon and star? Look for all those virgins.

And what about the people under that big “A”?

They’re the easiest to find, right under their graves.

God and Einstein

Curtis has a problem with my word “decide,” and I’m trying to figure out why. Responding to my assertion that we don’t have the capacity to decide whether there’s a god or not, he wrote:

The word “decide” has been stuck in my craw since Saturday. The best explanation I can muster is to ask, “do you think Einstein ‘decided’ that there is intelligence lying beneath it all?

So I’m not sure what exactly got stuck (or what a craw really is), but if the issue is something to do with deciding versus believing, I believe “decide,” which literally means to cut off, is appropriate. Atheists cut off the possibility of immanence; deists cut off the possibility of dust to dust. I don’t believe we have the capacity to decide either way.

“Believe” means to allow, and here’s what Einstein allowed:

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.

My Ash Wednesday mark

A long, long time ago I used to be one of those people walking around with crosses on their foreheads, but I think it didn’t happen till after school. Catechism class was on Wednesday afternoons, and I think they’d take us into the church for special ash-marking. I’m not sure about this, but I can’t quite imagine my mother taking us to church before school just for ashes.

Anyway, it seems quite an odd thing to me now, walking around marked by one’s religion – just as odd as saying “I’m a Christian, so I shovel other people’s sidewalks.”

Faith and falling in love

My true-atheist friend and I were talking the other day, believe it or not, about how faith is a gift. It would be so great, we both agreed, to think you’d be reunited with your family when you died (assuming you liked your family, of course. And I wonder what you’d do about that, if you didn’t. But I guess in heaven all the bad stuff in people’s personalities goes away, and you’re just left with the real lovely essence of the person. And the really bad people, who don’t have too much of that lovely essence, would all be in hell anyway.).

She said at least I had a head start, being brought up in a religion. But then it didn’t feel like a gift, it felt like an order. And maybe that’s why now, I just can’t do it. I can’t get there anymore.

I think it must be like falling in love – it’s not a rational process.

StarPower: a good game for atheists

When you write a blog, at least a WordPress blog, you get cool statistics about how many people viewed your post and where they came from. So far, my all time record is for an entry I called “StarPower, the game.”

Although I’m not really interested in tailoring my writing to attract hordes of people, I liked this surge in readership, especially since I haven’t finished writing about StarPower yet. It brings up a lot of thoughts for me, like the idea that this whole world is a game, maybe set up by some really smart gamer-geek space aliens. And maybe there’s a whole world out there of people, like the cult around the movie The Matrix, who agree with me.

One of the most interesting aspects of the StarPower exercise was how angry the participants would get at us, the facilitators, when we turned the game over to them. As I wrote before, their attitude was: How dare we make them play a game that had no rules? What were they doing in this workshop anyway?

How do we find our way out of games with no rules? How do we make sense of what we’re doing here?

Gods, myths, divine revelation – they all help, for those who can believe. Religions are great: they have lots of rules, and usually explain what we’re doing here in the first place. And in most religions, if you’re good, the game has a pretty great ending.

If you’re a true-atheist, though, the game, this life, is all there is. The rules are yours to make. You’re not a victim, or a subject: you’re finding your own way, standing on your own two feet, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps – just like a good Republican. Oh no, wait – they don’t like atheists, for some reason.