Beautiful writing, and I completely relate. As someone who was raised fundamentalist, “atheist” is such a loaded word and it just doesn’t fit...but I certainly don’t “believe” either. This is the first year (after nearly 15 years of doubt/disbelief) that we are doing nothing for Holy Week/Easter. Nothing. Feels strange, but also...nice to not have to explain things to my kids that I don’t even buy.
There's a whole cottage industry that I think of as "off-ramps for evangelicals/fundamentalists." One of its books, "Finding God In The Waves," was the end of my "deconstruction" journey. I had reached the bottom; all the parts were laid out for inspection. I could finally start rebuilding.
In that book, Mike McHargue offers a list of different theological categories, and splits "atheist" into three: the "lack of belief" style, the "antitheist" style (Dawkins fits this category), and the "nontheist" style. Looks like this article offers a similar distinction: https://authorofconfusion.com/2018/03/24/what-kind-of-theist-are-you/
Maybe the extra categories will be useful to you, too?
I've been listening to The Overstory for the past two months and it's making me want to be some sort of animist. I like the "ecotheist" idea someone else mentioned here. I feel like part of the "religious impulse" is a longing is for some larger mysterious narrative in which to find purpose, to be swept up in, at which to marvel. But like, how does the actual natural world not offer an excess of that, every moment, to anyone who stops to look?
> EZRA KLEIN: You bring up the arts, and I think people typically do — and I will say, of course, that you are a quite profound practitioner of this. I don’t think anybody who reads “The Overstory” ever looks at a forest quite the same way again. But I also want to go back to your idea of the humble sciences or the humbling sciences. I’ve heard you say before that you’ve become something of an animist, but I don’t get the sense that you mean an animist in the way you’ve had that in some religious traditions. You seem to me to be something of a scientific animist.
>
> And I’d like to hear you reflect on that, because there are a lot of people like me who yearn for a religion-like force, despite not themselves being personally religious. You can’t just will yourself to believe in things, but I’ve been struck that your path has been simultaneously quite spiritual and scientific. And I think people sometimes note things like scientism is a belief system. But it’s not really a constructed one in an intentional way, but I’ve begun to see people beginning to build out of the humbling sciences a worldview that seems quite spiritual. And as you’re somebody who seems to me to have done that and it has changed your life, would you reflect on that a bit?
>
> RICHARD POWERS: Well, sure. If we turn back to the new forestry again and researchers like Suzanne Simard who were showing the literal interconnectivity across species boundaries and the cooperation of resource sharing between different species in a forest, that is rigorous science, rigorous reproducible science. And it does participate in that central principle of practice, or collection of practices, which always requires the renunciation of personal wish and ego and prior belief in favor of empirical reproduction. At the same time, the vision that results the new understanding of what’s happening in the forest floor profoundly increases my sense of that system having agency, and having power and subtlety and anima in a way that seems less metaphorical than it did before.
>
> The more we understand about the complexities of living systems, of organisms and the evolution of organisms, the more capable it is to feel a kind of spiritual awe. And that certainly makes it easier to have reverence for the experiment beyond me and beyond my species. I don’t think those are incommensurable or incompatible ways of knowing the world. In fact, I think to invoke one last time that Buddhist precept of interbeing, I think there is a kind of interbeing between the desire, the true selfless desire to understand the world out there through presence, care, measurement, attention, reproduction of experiment and the desire to have a spiritual affinity and shared fate with the world out there. They’re really the same project.
I loved reading your thoughts on this--and how do we explain those moments that we know with a child or loved one that is simply unexplainable by terms we are schooled in. I think it would be surprising to have others share similar experiences--there are so many like that we keep to ourselves, because there is no explanation. Maybe explanation is too rooted in the dualism that we are indoctrinated with, between subject and object, mystery needing to be explained. Explanations are fascinating, and yet there is always more than just that--explanations don't describe the feeling or experience of such occurrences. Maybe faith isn't the word--maybe more it is just a knowing that there is always mystery. And how allowing for that, witnessing it, noticing it, is the key.
I find myself trying to sort out "faith" and "belief." Perhaps I'm overwhelmed by the idea of faith or burdening it with attributions it doesn't really require (but that I was at least implicitly taught as a child), but it seems to demand much more than simply believing (which is assuming, I guess), for example, that most people (someone said this in the comments) are ok, or at least try to be. Rather than thinking that this means my "faith" function is broken, I am wondering why faith would be a necessary component of our being. If its as trivial as having "faith" that you, too, will take your turn at an all way stop, then you can call that behavior whatever you want and my taking the word "faith" too seriously is my personal issue. But to say that there is an inborn religious impulse, which I would define as an impulse to worship something, just doesn't strike me as true. So, I guess I am also saying that I think faith can (or maybe I am saying should here) be disconnected from feelings of awe, mystery, wonder. Its quite a tangle, sin't it.
Totally relate. I agree there is not the quite word for what we are describing , but that is the inherent thing with language, and why we need other ways to express ourselves. I always think the quantum physics has more in common with the ‘spiritual’ and it’s just like they are describing the the same thing but with different terms and coming from different angles.
Seems to me you are by no means lacking in belief or faith or some sort of god -- so atheist (in its literal meaning) indeed does not work. I myself go (for the time being) with ecotheist (and refuse to look up any prior formal definitions for it). I know what it mean to me -- and am in it outside on earth every day.
Beautiful thought provoking writing! A favorite topic of mine to mull over. I think of Atheism as a “belief” in its own right and when there’s a belief it seems to require defending. I am fond of the belief phrase “hopeful agnostic”. Who are we if we don’t have hope and who really knows what the Mystery is? I began leaning more towards hopeful when I made the personal decision that I did not need to know or define but could relax into and revel in the wonder of it all.
Beautifully and thoughtfully penned. Thank you so much.
I believe that opening up new possibilities of being in the world requires a new language. Tonight I was gifted a new word—"unselfing." I am going to steep in that word for a bit.
I also just realized that I am agnostic about eggplant.
Sure did seem like you would enjoy! An educated guess :-)
I sure am digging your writing! So fascinating, virtually a polar opposite environment from where I am. I'll take a ride at night and be at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean with palm trees and a balmy breeze. Let's not forget the salsa music after sunset! I could go for a look at the Aurora and snowy mountains! Thanks for taking us on your journey!
I'd call myself an atheist, but I certainly have no need to disabuse people of their own beliefs. And why would I ever want to take something that gives people comfort away from them. That would be awful.
And I do have my own faith. I have faith that most people are good and that overall humanity is a little bit better than our history might otherwise suggest. Which is why things have mostly gotten better over the eons.
And I have faith that no matter what, the earth will abide because while there might be eight billion of us currently calling earth home, we are still only a small part of things.
This resonates on many levels, Nia. So many. I, too, don’t “choose” to be an atheist and often envy those who glean comfort in their religious beliefs. Thank you as always! 🙏🏻❤️
I wrote about something very similar just the other day. I attribute my tentative, first toe-test into feeling spiritual, to age. Something of a wall has fallen away a little, just enough to allow in experiences similar to those you describe. It feels both unfamiliar and also just right. I’m glad you wrote about this today.
Hope you get some sleep soon. Thank you for this essay. My husband is also an atheist and a retired science teacher and would not describe himself as spiritual and just repeats the first law of thermodynamics- that energy can neither be created or destroyed. That gives me some comfort.
“What I experience—and I am sure that many others do, too, even if they haven’t identified it—is lack.”
This is what it feels like, and all the effort is on re-connecting *back*. I have faith (sic) that there is connectedness, but maybe the weight of millennia of western european cultural baggage has ground this connectedness from the face of consciousness, it’s still there but there’s not the means to readily experience it. Maybe.
“What would a person’s life have to be built of to make them incapable of believing there’s something caring in the universe”
FWIW, *I* care! Peope care. Maybe that’s all we have, in which case maybe I need to cherish people more in the short time that I have?
I know what you mean about the guitars. And what a lot of maybes.
Beautiful writing, and I completely relate. As someone who was raised fundamentalist, “atheist” is such a loaded word and it just doesn’t fit...but I certainly don’t “believe” either. This is the first year (after nearly 15 years of doubt/disbelief) that we are doing nothing for Holy Week/Easter. Nothing. Feels strange, but also...nice to not have to explain things to my kids that I don’t even buy.
Im so impressed by your reading lists! 💛
There's a whole cottage industry that I think of as "off-ramps for evangelicals/fundamentalists." One of its books, "Finding God In The Waves," was the end of my "deconstruction" journey. I had reached the bottom; all the parts were laid out for inspection. I could finally start rebuilding.
In that book, Mike McHargue offers a list of different theological categories, and splits "atheist" into three: the "lack of belief" style, the "antitheist" style (Dawkins fits this category), and the "nontheist" style. Looks like this article offers a similar distinction: https://authorofconfusion.com/2018/03/24/what-kind-of-theist-are-you/
Maybe the extra categories will be useful to you, too?
I've been listening to The Overstory for the past two months and it's making me want to be some sort of animist. I like the "ecotheist" idea someone else mentioned here. I feel like part of the "religious impulse" is a longing is for some larger mysterious narrative in which to find purpose, to be swept up in, at which to marvel. But like, how does the actual natural world not offer an excess of that, every moment, to anyone who stops to look?
Ezra Klein's discussion with Richard Powers gets into "scientific animism" some: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-richard-powers.html
Quoting the most relevant part:
> EZRA KLEIN: You bring up the arts, and I think people typically do — and I will say, of course, that you are a quite profound practitioner of this. I don’t think anybody who reads “The Overstory” ever looks at a forest quite the same way again. But I also want to go back to your idea of the humble sciences or the humbling sciences. I’ve heard you say before that you’ve become something of an animist, but I don’t get the sense that you mean an animist in the way you’ve had that in some religious traditions. You seem to me to be something of a scientific animist.
>
> And I’d like to hear you reflect on that, because there are a lot of people like me who yearn for a religion-like force, despite not themselves being personally religious. You can’t just will yourself to believe in things, but I’ve been struck that your path has been simultaneously quite spiritual and scientific. And I think people sometimes note things like scientism is a belief system. But it’s not really a constructed one in an intentional way, but I’ve begun to see people beginning to build out of the humbling sciences a worldview that seems quite spiritual. And as you’re somebody who seems to me to have done that and it has changed your life, would you reflect on that a bit?
>
> RICHARD POWERS: Well, sure. If we turn back to the new forestry again and researchers like Suzanne Simard who were showing the literal interconnectivity across species boundaries and the cooperation of resource sharing between different species in a forest, that is rigorous science, rigorous reproducible science. And it does participate in that central principle of practice, or collection of practices, which always requires the renunciation of personal wish and ego and prior belief in favor of empirical reproduction. At the same time, the vision that results the new understanding of what’s happening in the forest floor profoundly increases my sense of that system having agency, and having power and subtlety and anima in a way that seems less metaphorical than it did before.
>
> The more we understand about the complexities of living systems, of organisms and the evolution of organisms, the more capable it is to feel a kind of spiritual awe. And that certainly makes it easier to have reverence for the experiment beyond me and beyond my species. I don’t think those are incommensurable or incompatible ways of knowing the world. In fact, I think to invoke one last time that Buddhist precept of interbeing, I think there is a kind of interbeing between the desire, the true selfless desire to understand the world out there through presence, care, measurement, attention, reproduction of experiment and the desire to have a spiritual affinity and shared fate with the world out there. They’re really the same project.
I loved reading your thoughts on this--and how do we explain those moments that we know with a child or loved one that is simply unexplainable by terms we are schooled in. I think it would be surprising to have others share similar experiences--there are so many like that we keep to ourselves, because there is no explanation. Maybe explanation is too rooted in the dualism that we are indoctrinated with, between subject and object, mystery needing to be explained. Explanations are fascinating, and yet there is always more than just that--explanations don't describe the feeling or experience of such occurrences. Maybe faith isn't the word--maybe more it is just a knowing that there is always mystery. And how allowing for that, witnessing it, noticing it, is the key.
I find myself trying to sort out "faith" and "belief." Perhaps I'm overwhelmed by the idea of faith or burdening it with attributions it doesn't really require (but that I was at least implicitly taught as a child), but it seems to demand much more than simply believing (which is assuming, I guess), for example, that most people (someone said this in the comments) are ok, or at least try to be. Rather than thinking that this means my "faith" function is broken, I am wondering why faith would be a necessary component of our being. If its as trivial as having "faith" that you, too, will take your turn at an all way stop, then you can call that behavior whatever you want and my taking the word "faith" too seriously is my personal issue. But to say that there is an inborn religious impulse, which I would define as an impulse to worship something, just doesn't strike me as true. So, I guess I am also saying that I think faith can (or maybe I am saying should here) be disconnected from feelings of awe, mystery, wonder. Its quite a tangle, sin't it.
Totally relate. I agree there is not the quite word for what we are describing , but that is the inherent thing with language, and why we need other ways to express ourselves. I always think the quantum physics has more in common with the ‘spiritual’ and it’s just like they are describing the the same thing but with different terms and coming from different angles.
Seems to me you are by no means lacking in belief or faith or some sort of god -- so atheist (in its literal meaning) indeed does not work. I myself go (for the time being) with ecotheist (and refuse to look up any prior formal definitions for it). I know what it mean to me -- and am in it outside on earth every day.
Beautiful thought provoking writing! A favorite topic of mine to mull over. I think of Atheism as a “belief” in its own right and when there’s a belief it seems to require defending. I am fond of the belief phrase “hopeful agnostic”. Who are we if we don’t have hope and who really knows what the Mystery is? I began leaning more towards hopeful when I made the personal decision that I did not need to know or define but could relax into and revel in the wonder of it all.
Beautifully and thoughtfully penned. Thank you so much.
I believe that opening up new possibilities of being in the world requires a new language. Tonight I was gifted a new word—"unselfing." I am going to steep in that word for a bit.
I also just realized that I am agnostic about eggplant.
Sure did seem like you would enjoy! An educated guess :-)
I sure am digging your writing! So fascinating, virtually a polar opposite environment from where I am. I'll take a ride at night and be at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean with palm trees and a balmy breeze. Let's not forget the salsa music after sunset! I could go for a look at the Aurora and snowy mountains! Thanks for taking us on your journey!
I'd call myself an atheist, but I certainly have no need to disabuse people of their own beliefs. And why would I ever want to take something that gives people comfort away from them. That would be awful.
And I do have my own faith. I have faith that most people are good and that overall humanity is a little bit better than our history might otherwise suggest. Which is why things have mostly gotten better over the eons.
And I have faith that no matter what, the earth will abide because while there might be eight billion of us currently calling earth home, we are still only a small part of things.
This resonates on many levels, Nia. So many. I, too, don’t “choose” to be an atheist and often envy those who glean comfort in their religious beliefs. Thank you as always! 🙏🏻❤️
I wrote about something very similar just the other day. I attribute my tentative, first toe-test into feeling spiritual, to age. Something of a wall has fallen away a little, just enough to allow in experiences similar to those you describe. It feels both unfamiliar and also just right. I’m glad you wrote about this today.
Coincidence or...
Today's marginalian
https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/03/14/the-transcendent-brain-alan-lightman/
Ah. I love this missive and loved revisiting that essay.
Hope you get some sleep soon. Thank you for this essay. My husband is also an atheist and a retired science teacher and would not describe himself as spiritual and just repeats the first law of thermodynamics- that energy can neither be created or destroyed. That gives me some comfort.
“What I experience—and I am sure that many others do, too, even if they haven’t identified it—is lack.”
This is what it feels like, and all the effort is on re-connecting *back*. I have faith (sic) that there is connectedness, but maybe the weight of millennia of western european cultural baggage has ground this connectedness from the face of consciousness, it’s still there but there’s not the means to readily experience it. Maybe.
“What would a person’s life have to be built of to make them incapable of believing there’s something caring in the universe”
FWIW, *I* care! Peope care. Maybe that’s all we have, in which case maybe I need to cherish people more in the short time that I have?
I know what you mean about the guitars. And what a lot of maybes.