Atheist Spirituality
Paper delivered to the Felkin College, SRIA
Fra. J. C. Allan Io, 2010
The question of the existence or otherwise of Atheist Spirituality would, I suggest, have been an anathema to the founders of Rosicrucianism; but, so would many of the topics studied by the colleges of our order today. Suffice it to say there are many paths one may tread on the journey of spiritual growth and the wise man would do well to discount none of them.
Imagine if you will a debate which starts with the leader of the affirmatives rising and opening with “The idiots on the negative side are stupid enough to argue ......”. And yet, on what some might argue is the greatest question facing Man, this tactic is often used.
In the King James Version of the Bible (Psalm 14.1) we read:
“The fool hath said in his heart,
There is no God.
They are corrupt,
they have done abominable works,
there is none that doeth good.”
However, by analysing what is said in the psalm, and with reference to Romans 1, it is obvious that the Hebrew word fool is taken to mean one who is morally rather that mentally deficient.
On the other hand, our good friend, Brother, the Reverend Doctor James Anderson wrote in his Constitutions of 1723;
“A Mason
is oblig'd (sic) by his
Tenure, to obey the moral Law; and if he rightly understands the Art, he will
never be a stupid Atheist nor an irreligious Libertine.”
This
raises an important question; is morality
dependent on the belief in God? Buddhists and Confucianists
are certainly moral people (with exceptions, like all societies), but their
faith is not built around the belief in a monotheistic God. From this fact
alone we can clearly state that both the biblical and Anderson’s Eurocentric,
Judeo-Christian propositions are untrue.
A
more important question arises from the atheistic belief, namely, does spirituality depend on the belief in
God? Or, more importantly to me as one beginning my spiritual quest, does it
depend on the strength of my faith?
To
explore this issue we need to tidy up some terminology. Albert Einstein was
once asked “Do you believe in God, Professor?” To this he correctly replied
“First tell me what you mean by God, and then I’ll tell you if I believe in
him”. This discourse is written from a perspective whereby the writer has
always functioned within the framework of Western society, ie. Judeo-Christian monotheism
and therefore any reference to the Atheist
refers to somebody who has developed their beliefs in
a similar context. As such many of us would accept that by God we mean an eternal, spiritual and transcendent being, both
exterior and superior to nature; one who consciously
and voluntarily created the universe. He is assumed to be perfect, omniscient,
omnipotent, infinitely kind and just and, as the
Creator, is not himself created; He is the enactment and personification of the
absolute.
Does
God exist?
Neither
science, nor any form of knowledge, (if by knowledge we mean the communicable
and repeatable result of a demonstration or an experience), can answer this. We
do not know nor can we know, at least not in this lifetime.
Do
we need faith in God?
The
Atheist, raised in the western tradition where he has
based his belief on the rejection of Muslim, Judaic and Christian dogma, is one
who believes that the God defined
above does not exist and he will probably base his belief on one or more of the
following reasons:
1. The
weakness of the opposing arguments, the so-called proofs of God's existence,
primarily the so-called “Ontological”, “Cosmological” and “Physico-Theological”
arguments.
2. Common
experience: if God existed, he should be easier to see or sense.
3. A
refusal to explain something one cannot understand by something one
understands even less.
4. The
enormity of evil in the world.
5. The
mediocrity of mankind supposedly created in the image of God.
6.
Last but not least, the
fact that God corresponds so perfectly to our
wishes that there is every reason to think He was invented to
fulfil them, at least in fantasy; this makes religion an illusion in the
Freudian sense of the term.
I am not about to enter into a discussion of merits of these arguments except to note that nobody can dismiss them as foolishness.
Dostoevsky’s Ivan
Karamazov allegedly stated “If God does not exist then everything is allowed”.
Such thinking can only lead to sophistry and nihilism. The dominant figure of
the post-modern age, Freiderich Nietzsche rephrased this in his Posthumous Fragments as, “Nothing is true, everything
is allowed”.
Of course the first
proposition is logically untenable, if “nothing is true” then neither is the
proposition. (Not A
therefore A). The great threat in the second part is a moral one. The
Atheist builds a double rampart against these temptations, opposing sophistry
with rationalism on the one hand, and nihilism with humanism on the other.
Taken together these two ramparts have been known since the eighteenth century
as “The Enlightenment”.
To the Atheist the gospels
and particularly the story of Jesus remain virtually true and certainly
relevant – I say virtually for he
would have problems with miracles and prophecies and at least three days of the
story of Jesus; Good Friday, Easter Saturday and Easter Sunday. Jesus himself
preached more about the relationships between men than he did of God or the
after-life, viz., The separation of
Church and State (“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are
Caesar’s”), universal humanity (“Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the
least of these, ye have done it unto me.”), valuing the present moment (“Take
therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the
things of itself.”), freedom of spirit (“The truth shall make you free.”) and
the parables of the good Samaritan and the Sermon on the Mount.
The wisdom of the gospels is
not denied to the Atheist so the question that remains to be answered is
whether or not his “foolish” or “stupid” belief that God does not exist
precludes him from spiritual experience.
He would argue that ethics derive not from faith (in God) but from the
value that allows societies to be cohesive – fidelity. Faith is a belief; fidelity is a
commitment. Faith involves one or
several gods; fidelity involves values, a history, a
community. Faith and fidelity can go hand in hand – this is piety. However they
can also come separately and this is what distinguishes impiety (the absence of
faith) from nihilism (the absence of fidelity).
In the Hymn to Charity, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul invoked what came to be called the three theological virtues – faith, hope and charity. In the Kingdom of Heaven, Paul tells us that faith will pass, we will no longer need to believe in God, we will see him. In Heaven hope will also pass as, by definition, there is nothing more to hope for. Only charity (love) will remain.
The atheist argues there is no need to have faith in the existence of heaven; it is here now all around us. It is up to us to inhabit the material and spiritual space (the world, our bodies, the present) in which we have nothing to believe and everything to learn, nothing to hope for but everything to do (for those things we can change) or to love (for those we cannot).
To sum up so far; it is possible to live without religion but not without communion, fidelity and love. (And yes my Masonic friends it is fid-el-i-tee, not fi-del-i-tee).
In its broadest definition, spirituality can be said to include virtually all aspects of human life and spiritual is more or less synonymous with mental or psychic. But this definition has become somewhat obsolete and when today people speak of spirituality they are usually referring to a rather limited part of our inner life, although it can touch upon the limitless – that part which involves the absolute, the infinite and the eternal.
We are finite beings who open upon the eternal; ephemeral beings who open on to eternity, and relative beings who open on to the absolute. Metaphysics means thinking about these things; spirituality is about experiencing, exercising and the living of them. The Atheist does not deny the absolute; rather he denies its transcendence, its spirituality and its personality. In other words he denies the absolute is God but rather that which exists independently of any of any condition, relationship or point of view.
This metaphysical stance, in its various modes, is
known as naturalism, immanentism or materialism. It generally follows from this
stance that nature is the totality of reality, there is no supernatural, and it
exists independently of the spirit which does not create it but rather was
created by it. We can designate the sum total of everything that exists or
occurs as the All.
Far from precluding spirituality this puts it firmly in its’ place which while not the first place from the universe’s point of view it is certainly the highest place from the point of view of man.
So, can there be atheist spirituality? By looking at the three theological virtues of Christianity the Atheist would argue that his is a spirituality of fidelity rather than faith, of action rather than hope (cf. Christian monasteries or Eastern martial arts), and of love rather than fear or submission. Thus the Atheist would argue that he faces the start of his spiritual journey with the same attributes as a person of Christian religion but in a slightly different form.
It would seem to this neophyte that there exists a “Law of spiritual potential” which might be crudely stated as;
“The spiritual potential of an individual is directly proportional to their ability to suppress or eliminate the ego (or self)”
To look up at night sky in silent surroundings is to be at one with both immensity and immanence. Do we perceive the universe or the multiverse? We cannot know and this is called mystery. It is the immensity that begins to reduce our ego in size and relevance and allows us to enter the state when immanence dominates – we become the All, or the All becomes us.
There is no distance, the furthest distances of the universe are within our grasp; there is no time; creation, the eons, the future and destructions are all laid before us; there is no dimension; quantum physics, metabolism, the rush of fluid in the xylem of a plant stem and cosmogenesis are all there for our view; there is no good or evil, at best artefacts of man, there is simply the perfect freedom of the All. It is a state characterised by absolute silence and the same over-abundant joy.
Freud described the dissolving of the ego as an “oceanic feeling”, a “sense of indissoluble union with the great All, and of belonging to the universal”. Experiencing this journey the atheist will ask “Why do you need God? The universe suffices. Why would you need a church? The world suffices. Why do you need faith? Experience suffices”.
The fact is that this experience is felt by people on every continent and in a wide range of intellectual and spiritual contexts; the feeling belongs to no one religion or philosophy which is as it should be for obviously spirituality is too important to be left in the hands of the priests, the mullahs or the “new age“ spiritualists.
The sense of beatitude that can be felt in the All puts the concepts of life and death into perspective. Andre Comte-Sponville sums this up in his words “Death can deprive me only of my future and my past, which do not exist. The present and eternity (the present therefore eternity) are beyond its reach. It can deprive me only of myself. Thus it will deprive me of everything and nothing. All truth is eternal ... death will merely deprive me of my illusions”.
And so to conclude; is my spiritual potential limited by my faith or my ability to suppress my ego (or self)? My research suggests that the latter is the case. The religious, I feel, suppress their ego by comparison to the immensity of their God, the Shamans by chemical and induced trance methods, but it would seem that there are many paths to the top of the mountain and the journey can be learnt with application.
Anybody who ascends significantly up the mountain to a spiritual life is gaining some of the ultimate experience of existence and if his method does not require of him a belief in God then he is merely a fellow traveller, hardly a “fool” or “stupid”.
Suggested reading:
Comte-Sponville, A. The Book of Atheist Spirituality (Translated), Bantam Press, London, 2008