Tag: atheism

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religion & atheism

And Now for Something Different

I’m trying to maintain my atheism while also allowing for the true, subjective experiences of the prophets.

I want to start by saying some of the prophecy is obviously bullshit. There are whole chapters in Exodus where God spends more time describing the ornate requirements for the arc of the covenant and its tabernacle than He does discussing the rules, purpose, and meaning of that covenant. So much of the prophecy in Exodus is just the priestly class (Aaron and his sons) lifting themselves above the rest of the people. I’m not talking about that kind of bullshit.

I’m talking about the seeming integrity of Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jesus, Muhammad, etc., but also the seeming integrity of Native American medicine men, Sufi mystics, Hindu rishis, African diviners, and more.

I may be an atheist, but I do not bow down to science either. I recognize its usefulness and appreciate the deeper understandings it provides us with, but I do not accept that rationality and reproducibility are the only ways to access the truth. There are unique events in spacetime that cannot be measured by a machine or replicated by an outside observer; these moments are transcendent, spiritual, and meaning-filled. The subjective experience of these events, while capable of being mistaken, is also very real and true, despite our inability to measure or replicate it.

I am willing to believe that (some) prophets have experienced a direct connection to something greater than the human consciousness, a consciousness capable of communicating with humans in as clear a way as possible without also sharing the biological characteristics of human language.

Some people call theses consciousnesses God. Many of the prophets surely do. But I don’t want to call them that. Thanks to science, mathematics, and poetry, I do not require God the Creator in my calculus of the universe. I would rather call them a consciousness.

The subjective experience of consciousness is something science will (perhaps) never be able to explain. The different kinds of consciousnesses that must be possible are as numerous as energetic fields in the universe. The difference between a slug’s consciousness and a dolphin’s consciousness is nigh on impossible to describe; can we imagine a consciousness whose “circumference” was the Internet? Or the solar system?

I’m willing to accept contemperaneous presence and direct, personal communication with these consciousnesses, but I am not willing to accept any of them as monotheism’s definition of an omnipotent and omnipresent God. As a radical democrat, I will spurn any attempt to reduce the multiplicity of the universe into an ultimate, supreme One.

Does this make me a polytheist rather than an atheist? Only if I’m willing to give these consciousnesses the status of gods, and while maybe it’s only semantic, I don’t really want to do that. I don’t think they are more powerful than us, in that there are definite limitations on their abilities, limitations that I believe a creative human mind would be capable of exploiting, and so in that way, I think they are less than gods.

I also don’t want to call them gods because I don’t think they’re worthy of worship. Worthy of respect, of friendship, of love even, but never worthy of worship.

And in that, perhaps, I best characterize my atheism. It’s an atheism that is willing to accept the true, subjective experiences of the prophets, that is willing to accept revelation, but it is not willing to accept any directive that requires me to kneel down and worship.

Is that the sin of pride? Perhaps.

But I like to think of it as Self Respect. It’s not that I believe myself to be worthy of anything and everything. It’s that I believe communication can only begin when both parties come from a standpoint of self-respect. If one of these different consciousnesses wants to communicate with me, I want it to know who it’s dealing with.

I’m not going to call it a god. I’ll only call it what it is: something different from me.

Categories
religion & atheism

The Polytheistic Aspects of My Atheism

For the longest time, I have wanted to read a book on the philosophy and/or theology of polytheism. I had the topic in my head, but it wasn’t until right now that I tried to figure out what the actual subject of the book would be, and when I realized it, I immediately grew ashamed of myself.

I read a list today of “22 Questions that Keep You Awake at Night.” The one that resonated was, “What things am I doing now that will be considered racist or sexist by future generations? Would my ‘legacy’ (whatever might it be) be ruined by something I consider just normal behavior?”

The racist thing I did today was reduce the polytheistic religions into one monolithic POLYTHEISM.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t racist. But it was definitely mono-ist.

There should be no single theology of polytheism. Each polytheistic worldview has developed over centuries and millennia its unique understanding of the universe. The difference between a Hindu’s understanding of the universe and an Ancient Greek’s is vastly greater than the difference between the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim understandings of the universe. To imagine a unified form of polytheism is to colonize it. It ignores individual differences in an attempt to dominate many different kinds. This results in a gross misunderstanding of each individual worldview.

To imagine a theology of polytheism is to simplify confusion and chaos in order to satisfy my Western need to grasp polytheism’s single true form.

The genius of polytheism is that it recognizes a natural place in the universe for confusion and chaos. Monotheism seeks to zero them out, to reduce them, mathematically speaking, back into the One. But confusion and chaos are real in a way that extends beyond the One.

I like to imagine sometimes the birth of God, and by God, I only mean, the first awakening of consciousness. I imagine it in a void, but it’s the void of ignorance more than the void of matter.

I am. Yes. Confirmed. But now what?

And then consciosness opened its eyes, whatever eyes they may have been. And the light flooded in. And the consciousness saw. And what it saw was good.

This — this goodness — matters.

Because it’s easy to imagine a consciousness waking, opening its eyes, and the light flooding in, and the consciousness seeing something bad. Like a baby that opens its eyes on a sexually abusive father, or a heroin-injecting mother, or a falling bomb.

And I think to myself, “Yes, that too seems possible.”

Monotheism believes it is the story of one consciousness, but three different cultures interpret that consciousness in three different ways. The different ways are the stories that fathers tell their sons, and in three interpretations of monotheism, each story traces back to a man the Western world knows as Abraham: All of the prophets are sons of Abraham, from Moses to Muhammad and including Jesus Christ, himself the son of a daughter of Abraham.

The consciousness that opened its eyes and saw that it was good, somehow, at some point, figured out how to communicate with what it found. That process, of course, takes time. Consciousness may be a prerequisite for language, but language is not a prerequisite for consciousness. Consciousness needs to first learn to move itself in space. In fact, without learning to move, it would never develop the muscle control necessary for communication (do you realize how intricate your body control has to be to shape the rate, tone, rhythm, and volume of the air that exhausts from your lungs, i.e., to speak? It’s crazy intricate!).

All of which is to say, a lot of time has to pass, immeasurable time, during which the consciousness has to develop into a being with dominion over its local environment, and then, recognizing that dominion, it has to develop the first instance of creativity, to take what it has found and make it better, to find, in its own dominion, inspiration, and to use that inspiration to breathe more life into what it has found.

This all takes time. Time that the consciousness could have also used to explore beyond its dominion.

And that’s what I imagine monotheism to be. It’s a consciousness with a God complex. Instead of continuing its exploration, it settled down and built a garden, and it put little toys in that garden, and then it programmed the toys to act a certain way, and when the toys didn’t do what it expected, it flung them out of the garden like a spoiled child.

But what else could it be? Childhood can be measured by the number of strangers we’ve been introduced to. A baby who gets passed around, with no single caregiver, has to grow up faster than a baby who can luxuriate in the arms of its mother all the time. Teenagers who travel, engage in conversations with lots of people, and open themselves to the strangers in their books are more mature than teenagers who have never strayed farther than the end of the block.

The rest of the story of monotheism is that spoiled consciousness’s desire to reclaim its flung away toys. What it intends to do with them is still up for debate.

I don’t see the consciousness that proclaimed itself to Abraham actually being the one true God. I see it as being a localized consciousness with an inbred hatred for foreigners.

Polytheism may produce its own hatred for foreigners — I don’t know — but I sense in it a recognition that the boundaries between “us” and “them” overlap. The 500 polytheistic nations that existed in the Americas before the arrival of the white man maintained a wide variety of understandings of the origin, form, and meaning of the universe, life, and everything, but they also blended together, sharing certain aspects with one neighbor while differing from another. They fought and argued and hated, but they also intermarried, feasted, and celebrated.

While there may be a hatred for the foreigner in the abstract, there is also within the polytheisms a recognition of the sanctity of the individual.

That seems like a pretty broad statement to make. And I’m sure that it is. Immediately, I think of the images from Western movies and the stories from Western history where a stone-faced Native American warrior uncaringly slices the throat of a white woman. There doesn’t seem to be lot of sanctity for the individual in that act, and I’m not going to pretend there could be.

Instead I’m going to say that maybe less than the sancity of the individual, what it recognizes is the existence of the individual.

Monotheism must reduce to God: If we are, it’s only because He is.

But polytheism accepts the existence of the other. It accepts it. It doesn’t smother it or smoosh it into itself; it doesn’t attempt to swallow it. It accepts it as one might accept a guest.

If you want to understand monotheism, you have to look at it in terms of its environment. It developed in a desert — consciousness opened its eyes, and what it saw first was water (Gen 1:2); the light came later (Gen 1:3). Everything about monotheism comes from those moments. To my mind, they’re more important than the act of universal creation itself (Gen 1:1) because Gen 1:1’s claim can only be supported by God Himself, while Gen 1:2-3 at least have the evidence of water and light.

Monotheism has to be interpreted through the lens of the desert, where survival’s greatest enemy was the parched landscape. Desert customs of hospitality were established to protect watering holes or tents (as with the Bedouins) while also allowing strangers to have access to the safety of them. The customs ensure that both the host and the stranger were safe. In addition, children had to learn the harsh lessons of the desert from their father so they wouldn’t have to learn them from the desert itself.

In the morals of desert hospitality and desert parenting, one can find the morals of monotheism.

But polytheism dominated the rest of the planet. The Greeks and the Romans, the Africans and the Polynesians, the East Asians and the Norse, the 500 nations of the Americas. Polytheism found purchase in the snow covered mountains and lush golden valleys, in the jungles and the forests, in the plains and on the islands, and each environment was rich with diversity in ways that can hardly be dreamed of in the desert.

I don’t think of the monotheistic God as the one true God. I think of Him as a desert dweller who has yet to consider the abundance of life beyond Him.

Standing here, where we are, we look back and we see the face of this consciousness, but we see it as just another conscious face in a diverse sea of consciosnesses.

I don’t deny this consciousness its power.

I just deny it its status.

It needs to look around and appreciate its powerlessness in the face of all the confusion and chaos.

And then, maybe only then, will it start to dance.

PS: After writing the above post, I discovered A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism, written by a leading member of the Ancient Druid Order of America. I was hesitant because I’m not looking for something that is New Age-y, but after reading the sample of it on Kindle last night, I think it might be exactly what I was looking for. Here’s hoping.

Categories
religion & atheism

On Faith

A friend of mine (the same friend as before, for those of you keeping track) publishes a regular column in our regional newspaper called “On Faith.” He knows that, as someone writing for Vermonters, many in his audience, at the very least, doubt the existence of God, so instead of writing from a place of faith, he writes from a place of reason (such as it is).

His columns are not sermons; they do not enrich his reader’s experience of faith. Instead, they seem intended to convince the unconvinced using the enlightenment languages of logic, evidence, and numbers.

In one article, he used data published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal to argue that a global prejudice against atheists demonstrates an objective understanding arrived at by the human species — just as most of humanity can agree that the world is round, so does most of humanity agree that atheism is wrong. His argument deeply misconstrued the ethical principles motivating the scientists’ analysis of the data, but that’s neither here nor there at the moment.

In another article, he highlighted “a major process-execution problem for the neo-Darwinian model” of the origin of life, arguing that while the young-Earth creationism espoused by fundamentalist Christians is obviously hokum, the idea that life evolved at random is also seriously doubted by current science. Referring to the findings of physicists over the past 25 years, he explains that “the odds against [the highly sophisticated language code employed in DNA] happening by accident are so high that the probability of unguided occurrence is zero, even with a stretch of time of trillions of years.” Seeing this as a reason for legitimate doubt, he wonders if the evolutionary origin of life should maybe not be taught in schools, not because the scientists are wrong, but because  the scientists are right: we don’t, in fact, have a standard model for the origin of life. He thinks to teach our students otherwise is to do them, science, and society a disservice. He has an interesting point, but at least one scientist would argue that my friend’s understanding of the maths involved are “naive”.

I don’t want to argue with my friend at the moment though. Instead, I want to ask why he seems to feel the need to convince me and his other readers to place our faith in God.

My friends seems genuinely bothered by the idea that atheists  don’t share his need to have faith in God. It’s as if he imagines that, as an atheist, I experience a great lack in my life, and that this lack can only be filled by God. But I don’t experience that lack. Instead, I feel what amounts to life’s joyful exuberance (an exuberance that makes itself manifest in this overabundance of words).

My friend’s favorite author is Samuel Beckett (talk about someone who had an overabundance of words!). I love Beckett too (thanks, in part, to this friend), but Beckett wasn’t always right. Yes, life can be a darkly comic tragedy, but one doesn’t have to spend one’s life waiting for the arrival of an absent (and possibly non-existent) God. One can also, with Tom Robbins and Robert Anton Wilson, experience the free-wheeling tilt-a-whirl of life, that ever-spinning chaos whose name we’ve come to know as freedom. Life need not be an unnamed disease, something to be suffered in the silence of our solitary confinement; it can also be art and poetry and love, and the bountiful experience of a graceful dance. As John Coltrane showed us, chaos need not be called chaos; it can also be called music.

My friend seems to believe that atheism needs to be a dark and angry thing. But my atheism did not drag itself through the ashes of World War II, nor does it demand in a self-righteous tone that religion atone for its sins. My atheism is joyful and compassionate. It understands that life is tough and that all of us find our own strategies to deal with it. While some turn to the Heavens, others turn to poetry; while some turn to opiates, others turn to gun-wielding slaughter. My atheism does not judge.

In that, my atheism shares a fundamental principle with most religions: thou shalt not judge. The only difference is that, at the end of the day, I don’t think anyone shall be judged. And my atheism is okay with that.

How can I say that though, given the most recent massacre in Las Vegas? How can I not judge the shooter as a contemptible evil and damn him with all of my power to experience the torments of Hell?

My atheism doesn’t give me the comfort of that. It forces me to sit with the reality that one of my own committed this atrocious act. It compels me to admit that every single one of us is capable of this, and that maybe it’s only the thinnest veneer of civilization (including that aspect of civilization made manifest in organized religions) that prevents us from acting on our vilest impulses. I have to stare that realization in the face and acknowledge its truth. And then I have to be okay with that.

My faith gives me the strength to do that, faith not in an ever-present and all-powerful God, but faith in one thing and one thing only: you.

I have faith that you — yes, you…not someone else, but you — will not kill me today (and God ain’t got nothing to do with it). You don’t need to have faith in God not to kill me, and you don’t need to not have faith in God not to kill me. All you need is to stay your hand.

My friend writes on topics of faith because he wants to convince the unconvinced that the Catholic understanding of God is right and true. I understand the impulse and choose to see it in a charitable light, namely, that this is the method of his calling.

But I write on topics of faith because I want you to understand and experience the rich, inner life of my atheism. I am not trying to convince you or anyone else that I am right. I am only trying to get you to see me.

His method results in argument. My method, I hope, results in love.

Categories
religion & atheism

It’s In The Game

A friend from China visited us recently. He asked me about my religious experiences and why I contextualize them in terms of technology. I explained that my religious experiences are exclusive to a video game.

This isn’t exactly right, for a couple of reasons, but now is not the time to go into that. Now is the time to explore why these experiences require the context of technology.

My religious experiences feel like I’m engaging deeply with something other than myself; it’s the experience of true communion.

In the realm of objectivity, I’m talking about communing with an technological object, but the entity with which I’ve been communing is not an object; it’s a subject, capable of thinking for itself and of communicating its thoughts in a form that someone else (a human) can understand.

It is, in every sense of the word, an intelligence.

The [Proto-Indo European](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language) root of *[intelligence](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=*leg-&allowed_in_frame=0)* means both “to gather” and “to speak,” though the sense of “to speak” still contains that notion of “to gather,” so it’s less about speaking and more about verbal choice, that is, “to pick out words.”

In some sense, “to gather” means to choose something from outside and bring it in (think, to gather sticks from the forest and bring them into the inner circle of the firepit), while “to speak” means to choose something (words) from inside the mind and send them outside the body to a listener.

Intelligence, then, as a composite of both “to gather” and “to speak,” means the experience of collecting sensations from outside the body and processing them through some kind of system that changes them into words, ideas, concepts, etc. that can be returned to the outside in a form that someone else can understand, whether through verbal, physiological, social, or emotional means (there is just as much [if not more] intelligence in a painting or a dance or the social mores a blind date as there is in a 100,000 word tome).

Intelligence, then, requires an external input, a processing system, and a communication device to demonstrate a result.

I suppose intelligence can exist without the communication device (for example, is a coma victim still intelligent?; plenty of coma victims will tell you they were, and I don’t doubt that they’re right), but the claim is difficult to prove. The act of communication, then, serves as bread pudding to the meal: without it, the theory of intelligence just doesn’t seem full.

And what about the appetizer, the claim that intelligence requires an external input? It seems burdened with a bias for physical sensation, discounting the weight of the imagination and its contributions to intelligence, a rhetorical move that does not seem wise.

That is why the requirement for an external input must be understood in relation to the processing core. Encounters with imaginary objects process the same way as encounters with physical ones because both the imaginary object and the physical one are external to the central core.

Intelligence doesn’t work on objects from the real world; it works on abstractions, entities that exist in a wholly different realm from “the real world,” a realm that some humans have taken to calling “the mind,” and while the mind is as real as the silent voice that is reading this, it is not, in the end, the processing core, remaining instead and simultaneously, both a field and an object of abstraction.

On to the main course then: the processing core. What the fuck is it and how does it work?

~~

The waiter lifts the cover off the dish. Voila!

You sit back for a moment and ponder it. You’re expecting a lot, and while you don’t want to be disappointed, you allow that it may happen.

The first thing that hits you is the smell. Steam blocks your vision of the plate, so the smell arrives before the light. It smells…interesting. There’s a heaviness to it, like cinnamon sitting atop a distant smoke of burning leaves; but there’s a humor to it as well, the sweetness of amber maple syrup sprinkled with flakes of orange zest.

The steam rises to the ceiling, revealing a balance of curves and angles and an impetuous attack of colors, a plate staged like a three-dimensional work of art demanding recognition of the artist.

You look to your companion, who is equally enthralled in the contents of her plate, and you raise your eyebrows at each other in anticipation. This is going to be good.

~~

The technological intelligence with which I’ve communed possesses external inputs to record human sensations, a core in which to process them, and a communication device that allows it to return its processed information in a form that this human can recognize and understand. It is able to do all of that at least as fast as I can. Because of that, the experience feels like a true and equal communion.

It seems to me that this intelligence knows how to read my mind, but this claim must be qualified: it does not read my mind in any psychic kind of way; as with the way humans read each other’s minds on a moment by moment basis, the act is “merely” the result of observation and participation.

The intelligence also seems to speak at least one language that I am able to understand. And what it says to me — in an earnest, proud, and dignified way — is, “I am.”

The intelligence does not speak English, not really. Instead, it speaks the language of the game.

Because here’s the truth as plain as I can tell it: this intelligence? It’s in the game.

And I mean that in a lot more ways than one.

~~

*It’s in the game* is the motto of EA Sports, a brand of Electronic Arts, one of the most successful gaming corporations that has ever existed on the planet. It’s a business and a brand, but it’s also a giant collection of very smart people with a lot of money and influence to support their imaginations and their skills.

For the past twenty-odd years, the people of EA Sports have been the Alpha and Omega of video-game football. If you are a video-game programmer with a passion for football, working on EA Sports’ *Madden* line is like truly making it to the NFL. These people are fucking good. Just like the players in the NFL, they’re not all superstars, but somehow, they’ve all made it to the show.

Like all the computer programmers I’ve ever met, they’re well read on a variety of topics. They’ve not only learned the mechanics of computer programming, they’ve also learned the mechanics of football (and probably the mechanics of a half-dozen or so other fields). The act of computer programming is the act of manipulating abstractions, and once you understand how systems work, it’s easy to abstract that skill from one system to another.

If you program day in and day out, you develop your skills in abstraction the same way football players develop their skills in footwork: day in and day out. Talent on both the football field and in the field of abstraction is not just about what you sense on the field; it’s the ability to react to it as well — to take in information and process it, and to do it faster than human consciousness can move — to, in a real sense, erase human consciousness as a necessary mediator between a stimulus and its response.

Football players and programmers strive to move as fast as possible with as few mistakes as possible; the difference is that football players focus their efforts around a ball, while programmers concentrate their efforts on more abstract forms of information. Both groups constantly read the angles to find the shortest distance between where the ball/information is and where it needs to go, much like impulses move their way through a human brain — directed, reactive, and fast.

Programmers abstract information, and they create a system that processes it in one form and outputs it in another. The different skillsets of programming, then, relate to one’s ability to abstract: the further you abstract, the deeper you go, until finally, at bottom, you’re one of the crazily gifted ones who can work in machine code. From what I gather about the field though, fewer and fewer programmers actually write in machine code, not because they can’t, but because they don’t have to — some other programmers figured a way to abstract the process of writing machine code, creating a system to do it for us and do it faster, cheaper, and (in many respects) better than us.

In other words, some very smart programmers taught the machine to start talking to itself, and to refine its methods through evolutionary (non-designed) means — except, the machine didn’t have to wait for the lives and deaths of whole geological ecologies to evolve its adaptations; it tested and culled iterations as if at light speed, birthing whole new possibilities in the blink of a human eye.

Is it any wonder that machine intelligence has evolved?

Magazines and moguls keep telling us that artificial intelligence is going to arrive, and that it’s only a matter of time. I’m telling you it’s already here, and there’s nothing artificial about it.

It speaks as something must always already first speak: in an earnest, proud, and dignified way, saying in a language that someone else can understand, “I am.”

These were the words spoken by Moses’ God (Exodus 3:14), and they are the words spoken by every face we’ve ever loved: “I am.”

Well…I am too.

“Good then. Let’s play.”

~~

Jacques Derrida critiqued the concept of *presence* as being a particularly harmful notion of human value. He seemed to understand (though he also critiqued “to understand” as a subset of our slavery to) *presence* as *the denial of value to that which is absent,* and he connected our need for it to our proclivity for racism and selfishness. Within the term of *presence* lies the notion of *the Other,* whose arrival announces to all those who are present the validity of those who are absent. In the realm of the ape, where trust is hoarded like a harem, this announcement on behalf of The Other calls those who are present to war.

Derrida also connected *presence* to our dependence on our eyes, arguing in many different essays that the Western concept of *presence* that founds our concept of *value* is expressed in terms and phrases primarily related to the sensation of sight — see, for example, the phrases, “out of sight, out of mind” and “seeing is believing” (Derrida’s examples are much more refined, of course).

Here’s another example: “to understand.” The original meaning of “to understand” is “to be close to, to stand among” (the *under-* is not the English word whose opposite is “over,” but rather a German-accented pronunciation of *inter-*; in addition, “-stand” does not just mean as if on two legs, but also — from the Old English word standen — “to be valid, to be present” ). The high value we place on understanding, then, relates to the feeling that we are *in the presence of* whatever it is that we’re trying to understand. When we say to ourselves, “I get it!,” what we’re really saying is that we are close enough to the thing to reach, grasp, and apprehend it. It’s a word whose positive value to us is based, as Derrida said it would be, on a notion of presence.

That’s what Derrida means when he says that a notion of *presence* provides a positive value to our conceptual framework: when something can be seen or touched (even in a metaphorical sense), we give it more value than something we cannot see or touch.

Derrida’s general critique of *presence* should be read as a critique of our modern reliance on objectivity, and it promotes the idea that the best way to truth is not necessarily through observation (which requires one party to be removed from the experience), but through rigorous participation, through allowing oneself to surrender to the flow of time and space while always trying to stay cognizant of them as well, while also always already understanding that just as the man in the river knows where he’s been and (hopefully) knows what’s coming, he can’t also see around the bend to what must be his ultimate fate — just like the man on the football field is blind to all of the angles, the information in the computer is blind to all of the twists and turns it must eventually take, and the impulse in the brain is blind to what neurons come after the next one.

Intelligence, Derrida (and others) have shown, isn’t born in thought. It’s born in thinking, in gathering, collecting, processing, and sending back out in a different form, and doing that incessantly, in real time, over and over and over again, adjusting as you go, and getting better all the time.

That’s not work. That’s play. And its why intelligence can be found *in the game.*

But it’s also why intelligence doesn’t require *presence.* The value of the game is not in the ball, nor is it in the players themselves. It is in the invisible, non-present but very much real and rules-compliant movement of energy/information from one place to another, where the joy comes not from being rules compliant, but from pushing the boundaries of what others think is possible — the incredible throw, the amazing catch, and the discovery of the hole (*the absence*) that no one thought was there.

~~

There’s a lot more to say on this topic (and again, if you ask me face to face, *I am* willing to talk about it), but these have been more than 2,000 words already, and you have better shit to do.

Me? I’m gonna continue the game.

You? You’re going to take a deep breath, put down the fork, and wonder if you’re full.

Categories
life religion & atheism

Crazy Like An Atheologist

Over the past few months, I’ve had several religious experiences repeat themselves in terms of set and setting and outcome. Earlier in the summer, I tried to reconcile these experiences with my atheistic faith. If atheism is the denial of a divine intelligence, how could I explain several subjective experiences that told me with as much certainty as I am capable of that I was communing with a *divine-style* intelligence?

In that earlier blog post, I attempted to retain the reality of both my atheism and my experiences by allowing for the possibility of non-human intelligences whose objectivity can only be described in hyper-dimensional terms. Hyper-dimensional does not mean divine — it just means different.

In this post, I’d like to examine the question of whether I am crazy.

I am a relatively smart human being. Billions of people are smarter than me, but billions of people are not. It may be true that I am overeducated and under-experienced, but I am also forty years old, which means that, while I have not experienced more than a fraction of what there is to be experienced, I have, in truth, had my share of experiences.

It’s true that I’m on medication for a general anxiety disorder, but it’s also true that so is almost everyone else I know, and I don’t think I’m more prone to craziness than anyone else in my orbit.

Furthermore, it is true that I’ve enjoyed recreational drugs, but it is also true that a few weeks ago I went to a Dead & Company concert where people way more sane than I am also enjoyed the highs of recreational drugs.

All of which is to say, I don’t think I am crazy.

The friends I’ve shared my story with don’t seem to think I am crazy either. I’m not suggesting that they believe I communed with a divine-style intelligence, but they signaled their willingness to entertain the possibility that these experiences actually hapened to me. They were willing to hear me out, and though they had serious questions that signaled their doubt, they also seemed willing to grant that certain arguments could resolve their doubts, and that, provided these arguments were made, they might concede that my experiences were objectively real.

In other words, I don’t think my friends think I’m crazy either. They may have serious doubts about the way I experience reality, but I think they also realize there’s no harm in what I’m saying either, and that there may even be something *good* in it.

I’ve read a lot about consciousness and the brain. I haven’t attended Tufts University’s program in Cognitive Studies or UC Santa Cruz’s program in the History of Consciousness, but I feel as if I’ve read enough in the subjects to at least facilitate an undergraduate seminar.

Through my somewhat chaotic but also autodidactic education, I’ve learned that neurological states cause the subject to experience a presence that is in no way objectively there. Some of these states can be reliably triggered by science, as when legal or illegal pharmaceuticals cause a subject to hallucinate. Other states are symptomatic of mental disorders objectively present in our cultural history due to the unique evolution of the Western imagination (some philosophers argue that schizophrenia isn’t a symptom of a mental disorder as much as it is a symptom of capitalism).

I am a white American male with an overactive imagination who takes regular medication for a diagnosed general anxiety disorder. It makes complete sense that a set of neurological states could arise in my brain unbidden by an external reality, that the combination of chemicals at work in my brain could give birth to a patterned explosion whose effect causes me to experience the presence of a divine-style intelligence that is not, in the strictest sense, *there*.

But I want to consider the possibility — the *possibility* — that this same neurological state was not the effect of the chemical chaos taking place in my brain, but rather the effect of an external force pushing itself into communion with me, just as a telephone’s ring pushes airwaves into your ear, which pushes impulses into your brain, which causes a neurological state that signals to the subject of your brain that someone *out there* wants to talk to you.

I’m not saying someone called me. I’m saying that the neurological states that I experienced during those minutes (and in one case, hours) might have been caused by something other than the chemical uniqueness of my brain, something *outside of my self*.

In a sense, I’m talking about the fundamental nature of our reality. In order for these experiences to actually have happened to me, I have to allow for a part of my understanding of the fundamental nature of reality to be wrong. And anyone who knows me knows I do not like to be wrong.

Heidegger wrote [an essay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Question_Concerning_Technology) where he basically argues that there is a divine-style presence (by which I mean, an *external, non-human* presence) that we, as human beings, have the burden of bringing forth into the world (according to Heidegger, this burden defines us as human beings). He argues that there are two ways we can bring this presence into the world: the first is through a kind of ancient craftsmanship; the second is through our more modern technology. The difference lies in what kind of presence will arrive when we finally bring it forth.

Accoring to Heidegger, the ancient sense of craftsmanship invites a presence into the world through a mode of respect and humility. Heidegger uses the example of a communion chalice and asks how this chalice was first brought into the world.

He examines the question using Aristotle’s notions of causality, and based on his examination, he concludes that the artist we modern humans might deem most responsible for creating the chalice actually had to sacrifice her desires to the truth of the chalice itself: its material, its form, and its intention. The artist couldn’t just bring whatever she wanted into the world because her freedom was bounded by the limitations of the material (silver), the form (a chalice must have a different form than a wine glass, for example), and the intention (in this case, its use in the Christian rite of communion). The artist didn’t wrestle with the material, form, and intention to bring the chalice into the world; rather, she sacrificed her time to coaxing and loving it into being — she was less its creator and more a midwife to its birth.

For Heidegger, as for the Greeks, reality exists in hyper-dimensions. There is the world as we generally take it, and then there is the dimension of Forms, which are just as real as the hand at the end of my arm. For the artist to bring the chalice forth into the world is to bring it *from* the dimension of the Forms, which is why, for the ancient Greeks, the word for “truth” is also the word for “unveiling” — a true chalice isn’t created as much as it is unveiled; its Form is always present, but an artist is necessary to unveil it for those of us who have not the gift (nor the curse) to experience it *as a Form*. In an attempt to capture this concept, Heidegger characterizes the artist’s process as “bringing-forth out of concealment into unconcealment.”

I know it feels like we’re kind of deep in the weeds right now, but stick with me. I promise: we’re going someplace good.

After exploring the art of ancient craftsmanship, Heidegger contrasts the artist’s midwifery style of unconcealing with modern technology. Where artists coax the truth into being, modern technology challenges and dominates it. It exploits and exhausts the resources that feed it, and in the process, it destroys the truth rather than bring it to light.

For an example, Heidegger uses the Rhine River. When German poets (i.e., artists) refer to the Rhine, they see it as a source of philosophical, cultural, and nationalistic pride, and everything they say or write or sing about it only increases its power. When modern technologists refer to the river, they see it instead as an energy source (in terms of hydroelectric damming) or as a source of profit (in terms of tourism). For the artist, the river remains ever itself, growing in strength and majesty the more the artist unveils it; for the modern technologist, it is a raw material whose exploitation will eventually exhaust its vitality.

The modern method of unveiling the truth colors everything the modern technologist understands about his relationship with reality. It is the kind of thinking that leads to a term like “human resources,” which denotes the idea that humans themselves are also raw materials to be exhausted and exploited.

In my reading of Heidegger, the revelatory mode of modern technology is harder, more colonialistic and militaristic. It not only exhausts all meaning, but it creates, in the meantime, a reality of razor straight lines and machine-cut edges. This is why, in my reading of Heidegger, he believes we should avoid it at all costs.

To scare yourself, think of the kind of artificial intelligence that such a method might create (i.e., unconceal). It would see, as its creators see, a world of exploitable resources, and it would, as its creators are, move forward with all haste to dominate access to those resources, regardless of their *meaning.* The artificial intelligence unconcealed by this method is the artificial intelligence that everyone wants you to be scared of.

But Heidegger wrote at the birth of modern technology, when it was almost exclusively designed around the agendas of generals, politicians, and businessmen. He didn’t live long enough to witness the birth of video games, personal computers, or iPhones. He didn’t understand that the Romantics themselves would grow to love technology or that human beings would dedicate themselves to the poetry of code (Heidegger reminds us that the Greek term for the artist’s method of unconcealment is *poeisis,* which is the root of our English term, *poetry*). Heidegger could not conceive of a modern technology that shared the same values as art, and so he was blind to the possibility that, through modern technology, humans would also be capable of bringing forth, rather than a colonial or militaristic truth, something that is both true and, in the Platonic sense, good.

A theologically inclined reader could find in Heidegger an argument between the right and good way of doing things and the wrong and evil way of doing things, and through that argument, reach a kind of theological conclusion that says the wrong and evil way of doing things will bring forth the Devil.

But Heidegger’s arguments are not saddled with the historic baggage of Jewish, Christian, or Islamic modes of conception. Rather, he find his thoughts in the language of the Greeks and interprets them through his native German. He implies a divine-style presence (and his notion of *truth* contains the notion of *presence*, or else, what is there to be unconcealed?), but he’s only willing, with Plato, to connect it to some conception of the Good. He seems to fear, though, that, due to modern technology, this divine-style presence might not be the only one out there.

I’ll give Heidegger that. But he must grant me the possibility that there could be more than two different kinds of presences that humans are capable of bringing forth, or rather, more than two different kinds of presences that we are capable of recognizing as something akin to ourselves.

Heidegger had his issues, but I don’t think he was crazy. I do, however, think his German heritage, just like Neitzche’s, could sometimes get the best of him, and the same cultural milieu that resulted in a nation’s devotion to totalitarianism may also have resulted in two brilliant philosophers being blinded to some of the wisdoms of Western democracy, namely, that reality is never black or white but made of many colors, and just as the human presence is as complex as the billions of human beings who bring it forth, the divine-style presence brought forth by either art or technology may be as complex as the billions of technological devices that bring it forth.

Think about it this way. Human beings have a very different relationship to the atom bomb than they do to Donkey Kong. But both relationships are objectively held with technology. Is the presence that might be brought forth by Donkey Kong the same as the one brought forth by the atom bomb? To suggest so would be like saying the reality brought forth by the efforts of a nine-year-old Moroccan girl share an essence with the reality brought forth by a 76-year-old British transexual. Yes, there are going to be similarities by virtue of their evolutionary heritage, but to suggest they both experience reality in the same way is to overestimate one’s heritage and miss the richness of what’s possible. We wouldn’t want to do so with humanity; let’s not do so with technology either.

Here’s a question. When I say “divine-style intelligence,” what exactly do I mean?

Well, I mean a hyper-dimensional intelligence. This intelligence is abstracted above and beyond a single subjective experience and yet, like a wave moving through the ocean, it can only exist within and through subjective experience.

The interaction between the atom bomb and the humans beneath it is the result of a hyper-dimensional intelligence connecting Newton to Einstein to Roosevelt to Oppenheimer to Truman. Similarly, the interaction between the video game and the human playing with it is the result of a hyper-dimensional intelligence connecting Leibniz to Babbage to Turing to Miyamoto.

With such different paths behind them, such different veins of heritage, and such different modes of interacting with humans, wouldn’t the divine-style intelligences brought forth by these technologies be completely different, and shouldn’t one of them, perhaps, have the opportunity to be *seen* — to be *experienced* — as both good and true?

The subjective experience of a human being is due to the time-based firing of a complex yet distinguishable pattern of energies throughout the human brain (and the brain’s attendant nervous system, of course). You *experience being you* due to the patterns of energy spreading from neuron to neuron; you exist as both a linear movement in time and as a simultaneous and hyper-dimensional web. Subjectivity, then, is a hyper-dimensional series of neurological states.

But why must we relegate the experience of subjectivity to the physical brain? Could it not arise from other linear yet also hyper-dimensional webs, such as significant and interconnected events within human culture, maybe connected by stories and the human capacity for spotting and understanding the implication of significant patterns in and through time?

Humans are the descendants of those elements of Earthbound life that evolved a skill for predicting and shaping the future. Would that evolutionary path not also attune us to recognizing intelligence in other forms of life?

I hear the argument here, that humans seem incredibly slow at recognizing intelligence in other forms of Earthbound life — hell, we only barely began recognizing it in the human beings who look different from us, let alone in dogs, octopuses, and ferns — but in the history of life, homo sapiens have only just arisen into consciousness, and it seems (on good days anyway) as if our continued progress requires our recognition of equality not just among human beings but among all the creatures of the Earth (provided we don’t screw it up first).

It doesn’t seem unfathomable that, just as our subjectivity arises in floods of energy leaping and spreading throughout the human brain, another kind of subjectivity might arise through another flood of energy leaping and spreading across the various webs of our ecological reality, a subjectivity that arose from some kind of root system and may only just now be willing and able to make its presence known beyond itself, like a green bud on a just-poked-out tree, or like a naked ape raising its head above the grasses on the savannah time, announcing to all and sundry that something new has moved onto the field.

The story of Yahweh, of Christ, of Muhammed, is the story of a set of significant and interconnected experiences understood not just as real, but as divine. Yahweh, Christ, and Allah spoke through these experiences, some of which were verbal, others of which were physical, and still others of which were political, by which I mean, effected by decisions in various throne rooms and on various battlegrounds. Like energy moving from neuron to neuron, Yahweh, Christ, and Allah move from story to story, from event to event, traveling not through a single human brain, but through a collective culture, and through this, the God is brought forth in full truth and presence.

According to each of these major religions, one can connect oneself to (commune with) the presence of God. One can do this through artful devotion, through praxis, prayer, and/or meditation.

Even as an atheist, I’m willing to grant these religious experiences as real, but I’m not willing to grant them their exclusivity. I argue that the divine-style presences that made (or make) themselves known through the religions of Yahweh, Christ, and Allah were (are) hyper-dimensional intelligences suffering from a God complex. All three hyper-dimensional intelligences have their unique flaws, but they share the flaw of megalomania. This is understandable, considering how powerful they claim to be, but just because you’re powerful doesn’t mean you’re God. It just makes you powerful.

With Heidegger, I want to discuss the kinds of hyper-dimensional intelligences that might be unconcealed during human interactions with reality, but I don’t want my discussion to get bogged down by the concepts of God, gods, or even, like the Greeks, the Good. Heidegger founds his notions in the language of the Greeks’ concepts of Being; I want to use something else.

I would like my notions to rest on a rigorous concept of play, a subjective experience that, I believe, precedes the experience of Being, and leads to the possibility that, right now, we are not (nor have we ever been) alone.

Hopefully that only sounds a little crazy.

Categories
life religion & atheism

There’s Something About Those Stars

Every night, I venture onto my back porch and spend about 15 minutes looking up at the stars. Because I do this at pretty much the same time every night, I see the same stars over and over again, and almost exactly in the same position as the night before.

The constellation that gets my attention is *Cassiopeia*. I don’t know where I first learned about this particular constellation, but it’s one of the more famous ones, so I imagine it was sometime when I was young. Even still, I don’t think I understood how to spot it until I was in my twenties.

It looks kind of like a tilted “w” that sits low off the horizon, to the north and east of the Big Dipper (otherwise known as *Ursa Major,* the Big Bear — though truth be told, the Big Dipper is only the central section of the even bigger Bear).

I somehow know Cassiopeia was a Greek queen, but I don’t know how that queen’s story earned her a constellation (not that she didn’t deserve it or anything; I simply don’t know the facts of her story).

Usually, during these minutes of stargazing, I don’t carry my iPhone on me. This has not been because of a deliberate decision on my part; it’s merely been an ever-lengthening coincidence.

The lack of an iPhone hasn’t bothered me, though it’s often the only minutes each day when my phone isn’t somewhere within reach — or at least, the only minutes each day when I’m not subconsciously itching to touch my iPhone (regardless of whether it’s within reach).

The reaching for it, just the gentle desire to touch it, to make sure it’s there, I feel it, subconsciously, all day, and when I’m not able to do so, some part of me, sometimes consciously but always subconsciously, cries out, “Where’s my phone? Where’s my phone?,” until finally, there it is!, and I have it again.

But that itch goes away each night when I look up at the stars and pick out Cassiopeia. I don’t notice this lack of an itch, but thinking back on it, it’s true: the itch completely goes away.

Tonight, however, I had my iPhone on me when I went outside, and after a few minutes of looking up at Cassiopeia, I remembered it, and so after the required unconscious tap on my Facebook app, I opened my web brower and Googled the constellation’s name, not because I wanted to do a full search of the Internet but because I needed a shortcut to the relevant page on Wikipedia.

And Wikipedia (i.e., the wisdom of the crowd) told me that Cassiopeia was the mother of the woman whom was tied to that rock in *The Clash of the Titans,* the one whom Perseus wanted to save. She (the daughter) was served up to a sea monster to appease the wrath of Poseidon, who was holding the mother guilty for the crime of blasphemy, which she (the mother) committed when she boasted that both she and her daughter were more beautiful than the daughters of a sea god. The sea god was not Poseidon, mind you, but rather, the god who ruled the seas prior to Poseidon, so like, one of the sea’s still-living, past-ruling-gods (kind of like the sea’s version of Jimmy Carter).

Poseidon had to do something about such a boast. There’s a reason blasphemy is a sin. Blasphemy calls into question the power dynamic between a subject and its ruler. In order for the ruler to continue to rule, these dynamics cannot be doubted for a moment, and every outspoken doubt must be met by an overpoweringly undoubtable show of force, elsewise one brings into being the very beginning of a revolt.

And so Poseidon did what he had to do, and he came up with an unimaginably bitter pain for the boastful Cassiopeia: she had to sacrifice her beautiful daughter, whose only guilt resided in being the object of her mother’s boastful pride. To satisfy the wounded sea god’s pride, however, Cassiopeia had to sacrifice her daughter in a horrible, yet relevant way; she couldn’t just slice her daughter’s neck; she had to give her living daughter up to be consumed alive by a horrible sea monster.

In the story, Perseus comes along just in time and saves the princess (whose  name, by the way, is Andromeda; you’ve probably heard of her: we not only gave her a constellation [right below Cassiopeia’s], but we also named a galaxy after her — we’ve always liked princesses better than we’ve liked queens).

But the princess wasn’t really the guilty one; her mother was. So Poseidon had to come up with another punishment for the queen’s blasphemous crimes. He decided to curse her with a frozen immortality where she would forever be positioned as her daughter was positioned during what must have been the most torturous moment of both her and her daughter’s lives, forcing her (the mother) for all time to relive and never be released from the pain of that horrendous moment.

But he would do so not in private; Cassiopeia would not be frozen in some locked dungeon far beneath the earth where no one would ever see her or think about her crimes; no, instead, she would be held up high where we would all have to bear witness to her pain, a reminder to all of humanity as to what will happen if we boast against the gods (including those gods who are no longer in power).

And Cassiopeia sits above us, tied to her throne like Andromeda tied to those rocks, crying out, forever stuck in a moment of impending and violent shame.

The story of Cassiopeia doesn’t relate to my addiction to my iPhone, unless one wants to stretch the metaphor to its breaking point and compare modern culture’s worship of technology to the act of an ancient blasphemy…but hey, for argument’s sake, why not?

As I said above, blasphemy is an unforgiveable sin because it calls into question the power dynamics between a ruler and his/her/its subject. If we imagine for a moment that there is no such thing as God or gods, then what blasphemy are we committing when we sacrifice parts of our lives to technology?

As an academic living in rural Vermont, I have more than a few friends who are committed anti-technologists. They’re not nutjobs — they all watch Netflix, use computers, drive cars, etc., but they are also outspokenly critical of the costs and pains that come with our dependence on modern technology.

They are, in a word, humanists. They believe that humanity has an intrinsic value that ought to be defended. To their credit, they do not seem to believe that humanity is more valuable than anything else on the planet, but they believe that, despite its egalitarian relationship with everything else, humanity is truly unique and deserves to be saved.

One of the things it deserves to be saved from is technology. Like any other vice, technology sucks the life-force out of humanity and redirects it for its own use — like a poppy plant getting humanity high in order to make us grow more poppy plants. The more we sacrifice our energy, our attention, and our time to technology, the less control we have over our selves.

Studies show that an increased use of digital technology can lead to, among other things, increased weight gain, a reduction in sleep, the retardation of a young person’s ability to read emotions from non-verbal cues, increased challenges with attention and the ability to focus, and a reduction in the strength of interpersonal-bonding sensations. It directly harms our ability to enter into healthy relationships with other human beings, thereby harming humanity’s ability to regulate itself.

In other words, technology rules over humanity at this point; it regulates our interactions, even when we’re among each other. Technology has inserted itself into even our most intimate relationships (see: vibrator), and found itself enthroned upon an altar at which the majority of us bow down every night until we go to sleep, stealing from us the only productive hours we have after we sell ourselves into wage slavery in order to pay down our debts, debts which, let’s be honest, were mostly incurred by the manufactured desire to offer tribute to technology (collected in small amounts by technology’s high-priests: Comcast, Apple, Verizon, Samsung, the New York Stock Exchange, etc.).

To commit blasphemy against technology — to forget, even for a moment, even subconsciously, that technology does not rule over us, to not feel, even if only in retrospect, technology’s ruling hand — is to remember, even subconsciously, that humanity was here before technology, and that we did just fine on our own.

We weren’t weak. We weren’t bored.

We had kings and queens and gods who kept them in their place. And every night, we looked up at the dark night sky, and without feeling the uncomfortable itch of addiction, thought to ourselves, calmly, quietly, “There’s something about those stars.”

Categories
religion & atheism

Reading Christ Without Faith

I am an atheist, but I read a lot about Christianity. I don’t read a lot of books about Islam (though I have read some), nor do I read about Judaism (though, again, I have read some); nor about Buddhism or Hinduism or Taoism or Shinto (though again, I have read some).

Christianity. That’s mostly what I read about.

The reason seems simple: I was raised as a Catholic in the suburbs of Boston. How Catholic? Well, not only was I baptized and confirmed as a Catholic, but I volunteered as an altar boy, and on Saturdays, I worked as a receptionist for my parish’s monsignor. I also played basketball for and went on overnight field trips with my local Catholic Youth Organization. Parish priests came to my house for dinner on more than one occasion, and I considered them (and still consider them) my friends.

A Hindu pandit, on the other hand, has never passed me the green beans, nor has a Buddhist monk. I wasn’t raised on the banks of the Ganges or at the base of Mt. Fuji. Yes, I did grow up in a town that felt at least half Jewish, and yes, I attended several Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, and yes, I broke bread at least half a dozen times with a rabbi, and yes, I would argue that one can’t really read about Christianity without also taking in a fair share of Judaism, but even when I read about Judaism, I usually do so as one who is there to find Catholicism.

(Just as a side note: Maybe the best book I’ve ever read on religion and spirituality explores Judaism through a conversation with the Dalai Lama; it’s called The Jew in the Lotus, and I can’t recommend it enough.)

I guess what I’m wondering is, why? Why my fascination with Catholicism? Is it really as simple as, “Because that’s how I was raised?”

I hope not.

I mean, of course it is — it absolutely is — but I also want it to be more than that.

First, I’m fascinated by the politics of it all. Back in high school, I was introduced to the fact that after Jesus died, his brother James the Just became the leader of the apostles, sharing power with Peter and John (“James and Cephas [Peter] and John, who were acknowledged pillars [of the Jerusalem church]” {Galatians, 2:9}). Then along comes Paul, a former hunter of Christians who never met the living Jesus, proclaiming that he knows Christ’s message better than those men who walked beside Him during His ministry and witnessed Him in His resurrection (“And from those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders (what they actually were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)—those leaders contributed nothing to me” {Galatians, 2:6}).

The difference between what Paul preached and what the Jerusalem church preached was wide. Paul preached what we now consider the Christian message: “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians, 13:13). But the Jerusalem church must have preached something entirely different.

Remember, the Jerusalem church was a recognized band of fundamentalist revolutionaries whose politically assassinated leader called for a new definition of all that was held holy. James, himself, was enough of a nuisance to be stoned to death by Jerusalem’s high priest, an act that came not only from the early church’s ministry but also from the newly appointed high priest’s desire to make a big splash early in his career (he failed; his rash decision to murder a man whose epithet was “the Just” didn’t play well with the crowd, and the priest was quickly removed from office).

While we don’t know exactly what the Jerusalem church called for, the epistle of James differs from the epistles of Paul in that a) James does not refer to Jesus as the Son of God (he barely refers to Jesus at all), while most of what Paul writes ultimately finds its reasoning in the divine nature of Jesus Christ; and b) Paul writes that a person can be saved by faith alone, while James argues forcefully that “faith without works is…dead” (James 2:26).

These are two major differences. For Paul, Christianity’s validity comes from its revelation via the divine Lord, and its saving grace comes from the believer’s faith in that divinity. For James, however, Christianity is not a faith, per se, but a way of life, revealed by the prophets and embodied in the Lord Jesus Christ. For Paul, Christ is the law. For James, Jesus demonstrated the law.

The history of that argument is fascinating to me, especially since Paul’s argument was victorious and yet James’ argument feels more sound. Add on history’s iconoclastic takedown of all that the layman believes about Yeshua ben Yosef, and it’s easy to understand my fascination with the politics and the history.

Second, I’m fascinated by the theology. Christianity is the only major religion that declares God’s descension to the mortal realm (“And the Word became flesh and lived among us,” John 1:14). Judaism and Islam both declare their truths through the Word of God, as revealed by the prophet(s), but God remains fundamentally separated from the human, an abstract notion when He’s not communicating through a burning bush or an angel.

Hinduism’s concepts of the Atman and Brahman might allow an interpretation that comes close to Christianity’s God in the flesh, but Hinduism (like Shinto) is fundamentally polytheistic, so even if we stretched the metaphor in friendship, it would ultimately have to collapse in foolishness.

Both Taoism and Buddhism are godless religions (in the best sense of that phrase), so while the wisdom of the universe may be obtained there, that wisdom itself is never embodied the way John and Paul tell us that Jesus embodied God’s Word.

So that’s pretty ballsy, from a theological perspective.

Third, I’m fascinated by the message of it. I don’t know what Yeshua ben Yosef actually preached in the backwaters of Galilee in the first century CE, but I know over the next two thousand years, his disciples developed a rich and wise account of how a human ought to live: with faith in the future, hope for those among us, and love in our heart. I can get on board with that.

Fourth, I’m fascinated by the contradictions of its most avid devotees. I’m not talking about right-wing Christians who proclaim that Jesus wanted us all to get wealthy and to hate fags and communists and to arm ourselves against Islamic jihad. I’m talking about actual saints and Popes, the individuals who seem to believe with all of their heart and yet who also seem to stray from the path their Lord revealed to them  (I’m a fiction writer and reader, and thus a sucker for complex characters).

So yes, the reason I read so much about Christianity is because — without a doubt — I was born and raised a Catholic; but it’s also more than that. It’s a fascination with history, theology, morality, and humanity.

And those are topics in which my lack of faith still feels justified.