An Atheist In God’s Kingdom

Let me come right out and say this: I am an atheist – identifying myself as Christian is simply shorthand for describing the complex worldview that I hold*. This may shock and surprise those of you who’ve often heard me declare that I’m a Christian, but there is no hypocrisy: I have never had a real, empirical, first-hand experience of God, or even any semblance of an experience that could be described as supernatural, and therefore have no rational reason to believe in a god (or gods). However I firmly believe in the benefits of “church”, which is why I still attend one, and is a subject which will form the basis of a series of posts titled An Atheist In God’s Kingdom – starting with this one. I intend to be a voice for a group that currently isn’t very well represented: atheists who support and encourage the institution of religion, if not necessarily its underlying beliefs.

Peter Singer, a prominent Australian ethicist who spoke at the recent Atheist convention in Melbourne, once proposed the “golden rule” which he reiterated at the convention: “that it is a function of our development as humans who feel pain, take time to raise our helpless young, live in social groups and need to co-operate” (quoted from The Australian). That is, we are intrinsically social beings and cannot live or function in isolation.

I had a very profound personal experience of this several years ago, a couple of years after I came to Sydney. Sitting alone in my apartment one afternoon surrounded by books, games, computers, musical instruments and endless other things that I had gathered together for my personal enjoyment and entertainment, I was suddenly overcome by a crushing despair, and completely overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness. Afterwards, it became clear to me that although I have the kind of personality that doesn’t get along well with other people, I still needed close friends (to my friends in Adelaide who are reading this: I mean ones that live in the same city). The problem was, I didn’t know where I could find any.

Faced with the same situation, some of you would probably consider going out to a public place like a bar or club. Now I’m not criticising any of these things, but I had quite a sheltered upbringing and don’t drink, smoke, dance, or chat up strange women (however attractive), so that form of “socialising” contained too many obstacles of too great a size for me to overcome on my own.

Now consider the church – as in any significant gathering of people from a religion, not just Christianity. Before I go any further, I need to level-set with you: what I’m about to talk about here is the Ideal Church. Such a thing does not currently exist, and probably never will. It’s certainly not unexpected that you’ll be able to think of specific examples that illustrate failings in the areas that I mention. As I go further into it, you’ll see that this Ideal Church may not even be a church at all, but I’m getting ahead of myself…

The “body of Christ” welcomes one and all with open arms – there is no requisite to believe, since converting the unbeliever is part of their remit from God. And there are certainly no material requirements – you don’t have to be rich, good looking, or socially adept (but as with every other area in life, having those things does help). It happens reliably week after week, and as long as you keep going to the same place you’ll always see the same people. And there are loads of these pre-packaged communities.

I can’t think of anything in the secular that can even remotely compare. Book clubs, hobby enthusiasts, rotary, etc. – all but the largest of these community groups (e.g. Scouts) are dwarfed in size and scope by even the smallest of church gatherings. Here are people gathering together in communities every week, building lasting relationships and helping one another out, united in mind and purpose.

And therein lies the rub: secular society lacks a consistent, coherent system of communities. Militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, et al are barking up the wrong tree in trying to tackle the problem intellectually, targeting religious belief systems such as Creationism. They need to build and present a viable means for people to come together under a broad-ranging common banner. You could point to interest groups and the like, but these are way too specific to be of any use to the general populace. That the need is there is apparent – over 2,500 people attended the Atheist Convention mentioned at the beginning of this post. Atheist groups can also deny that their gatherings are like a church of unbelievers, but in truth this label opens up many more possibilities to them than if they are closed to the idea simply out of fear of being labelled as an alternative religion.

What form would these meetings take? I couldn’t possibly know, but I would once again defer to religion to provide the model. Having a person to deliver a short, life-affirming message, not based on religious dogma but around human achievement and experiences. One organisation that’s already doing something like this extremely well is TED, with their 18 minute time limits and topics that always inspire, but they need to break out from their current demographic of intelligentsia, celebrity and academia, and realise that they have a huge global following amongst the laity and use that to help bring people together at the local level.

I’ll bring this very long post to a close by mentioning that one of the strongest criticisms often levelled at the church is the amount of money that it draws from its congregations. Think about it though: people will invest both time and money into something that they value, and the rarity of being able to find a good community is probably what allows churches to command a high price.

As I mentioned at the beginning, there’ll be more in this series. I hope you find it interesting enough to keep coming back or subscribing to, and I always welcome your thoughts and comments.

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* I admit that there’s a certain degree of semantic trickery involved here and that I should probably just go with “agnostic”, but let me explain: agnostic is to belief and non-belief what omnivore is to carnivore and herbivore. Unlike agnostics, I’m not taking an each-way bet – either there is a god or there isn’t; none of this “it’s impossible to know” business.

Reading between the lines

Jenny absolutely loves movies. Me, I don’t care much for them, reason being that the plots inevitably hang one or more of the characters doing something stupid. We borrowed a couple DVDs recently – The Descent, which featured a group of girls being as irritating as possible and making irrational decisions at every turn so that their friendship dissolves into bitter enmity; and The Reader in which a character allows herself to be incarcerated for life because she’s too ashamed to reveal that she’s illiterate.

While The Descent did nothing to improve the thriller/horror genre’s standing in my books, I did find myself being somewhat affected by The Reader (and not because Kate Winslet is naked in half of her on-screen appearances). There’s a lot of tension as Michael Berg (played by David Kross) grapples with his conscience as to whether he should keep silent and see his unrequited love go to jail, or speak up against her wishes and shame her in front of the court (and presumably, country). While Jenny was weeping by the end of the movie, the whole time I was going “is it really worth being sentenced to prison for life, just to hide the fact that you can’t read and write?” while secretly choking back a tear.

This probably reveals just how much of a geek I am, which is to say completely out of touch with my emotions (feelings that can’t be expressed with an emoticon don’t exist :-P) – but maybe like the cliché about the speck of grit being the source of great beauty, flaws are necessary for the telling of great stories, and it’s only by allowing yourself to ignore these flaws that one can connect emotionally. I blame my inability to appreciate this on being exposed to too much awesome.

So where does that leave The Descent? The oyster must’ve gotten a mouthful of dirt, choked and died.

Notes on “The Danse Macabre”

I chose to publish The Danse Macabre without comment, so as not to distract from the impact of it by revealing my processes. But now that it’s been out there for a bit, I can’t resist the urge to share about how it came together.

For one thing, I’m immensely proud of the fact that I wrote the poem completely unaided. It was entirely conceived, crafted and completed using only my brain. No computer, no dictionaries (rhyming or normal), no thesaurus – just me hacking away at the words using pen and paper.

I forget where the title and topic came from. I just remember that I heard or read the words “danse macabre” somewhere, and it sounded interesting. The rest sprang from my current, dark muse.

Here is the first draft of the poem. It starts out exactly the same way, but you’ll notice that it started off in a very different direction:

And here’s the last draft – I made some minor changes while typing it into the computer:

All up I had about 11 pages of drafts, working notes, scribbles. I must admit though, my handwriting has become extremely lazy as a consequence of doing almost all of my writing on computers, and often resembles a backwards form of Arabic more than English!

It’s hard to say whether my choice to forego technology affected the outcome. I feel that it’s about the same – in terms of how long it took to get from conception to completion, and also how my brain is almost as reliable as a dictionary in providing the words that I’m looking for (maybe I’m biased towards using words that I know than the ones that I don’t).

How would you rate Macabre compared to my other works?

The Danse Macabre

O pretty young thing with your heart on a string,
Weeping alone in the dark.
As you drown in your sorrow, a few minutes I’ll borrow,
And ‘pon your future remark:

There’s no point in crying and no use in trying,
Your life’s endeavours will fail.
Whatever may be, in the end you will see,
That I will always prevail.

Which Tom, Dick or Harry will you run off and marry?
‘Til death do you part – what a lark!
In sickness or health, in poverty or wealth,
My role I’ll most faithfully hark.

And what of a job, or which bank will you rob,
To fund your miserable life?
P’rhaps dig your high-heels in and touch the glass ceiling,
Or be kept as a mother and wife.

You cannot decline the ravages of time,
The clock is also my slave.
With the years at your tail like the hare not the snail,
You’ll rot as you race to the grave.

So will you heed? Come ride my black steed,
Stop hiding behind a façade.
In the end young or old, the meek and the bold,
Will all dance the Danse Macabre.

Goog or bad?

Nobody likes advertising. Don’t get me wrong, some ads are very artistically creative, and others are entertaining. But as a whole, we find advertising intrusive – that’s its nature: to inform you about something that you otherwise wouldn’t have known about.

There is a flood of information out there, and part of our lives involves wading through and picking out the bits that are relevant to us. We’ve essentially reverted back to a hunter/gatherer species, except with abstract needs such as information and entertainment instead of the basic needs of food and shelter.

The Internet is one such morass of information, and Google purportedly came along to help us sift through it to find what we want. Hooray! we think, under the delusion that this would slowly push back the ever-increasing encroachment of advertising into our lives. Oh how wrong we were… Google is now probably the world’s largest advertising company. It’s entire revenue model is based on the selling of ads, and the total volume of ads that we now see on a daily basis has increased, not decreased.

Will we ever arrive at the stage where we can be rid of advertising? Not if Google has anything to do with it. Their overarching mission is to dominate platforms where they can flog a product, or if that’s not possible, use it to increase the leverage of their other products that can (usually Search). The company rarely innovates or invents, and simply refines and improves what already exists: Yahoo, Altavista and many other search engines existed before Google, Cloud-based applications were available long before Google Apps, and surely nobody is deluded enough to think that mobile telephones didn’t exist before the Nexus One (iPhone, anyone?)

That’s not to say what they do is without merit, but look at their business strategy: identify a technological category which could be monetised by advertising, assimilate it into the Google family, crush the opposition, and move on. It might seem benevolent for them to offer something that previously cost money for free, but in doing so they’re making the true costs opaque. Users of Google AdWords simply trust that the cost of bidding on a keyword is driven by “market forces” but how do we know that Google isn’t taking a bigger cut than they deserve?

Even more scary is their recent foray into the political realm, provoking China over the issue of censorship. Regardless of which side of the fence you sit on in regards to the Great Firewall, Google’s actions should be troubling: they are leveraging moral issues for financial gain, turning their corporate mantra of “don’t be evil” into a mission statement.

With its superpowers, will Google don a metaphoric cape and start fighting against what it perceives to be “evil” – i.e. countries, religions and political systems that stand in the way of its financial gain?