Now that everyone in America is heartily sick of Rule By Evangelism, the inevitable atheist backlash seems to be underway. Last night I watched Bill Maher’s commentary on the Al Smith charitable dinner (sponsored by the Catholic Diocese of New York), and was impressed by how vigorously he tore into religion, which he calls the greatest con ever perpetrated. Along with Christopher Hitchens–a more quixotic atheist, who rejects God but buys into American eschatology without reservation–Maher is a herald of change. Strange as it may seem, I think that change is positive. The world is overrun with religious fundamentalists of all stripes. A good bucket of cold water–one that encourages religious people to be a little more humble and self-critical–is exactly what we need.
But it’s not all we need. While I think some political and social opposition to religion is healthy, the anti-spiritual current running beneath it troubles me. This trend is not only perpetrated by atheists, however–religious people are guilty of it too. We live in an excessively legalistic age, in which personal experience is disregarded when it does not conform to a certain set of cosmological or social rules.
I’ll explain. I had my first precognitive dream when I was seven. In this dream, I was looking at my aquarium: two particular fish had died, and lay in a particular position at the bottom of the tank. The next morning I bounced out of bed to inspect the tank. All the fish were quite alive. I didn’t think about the dream again until several days later, when I came back from school to discover that those two particular fish had died, and lay at the bottom of the tank in that particular position. Though I had been raised in an adamantly atheist household (there is no unseen or spiritual realm, and all things on this earth can be explained using existent scientific methods), I was unbothered by what had happened. It didn’t seem profound or even abnormal. But when I thought about telling anyone what I had seen, I felt anxious–I knew no one would believe me. And when I say no one, I mean no one: I had religious friends as well as atheist ones, and I couldn’t envision any of them reacting well to such a claim. So I kept it to myself. I would have similar small, inexplicable experiences again and again as I got older.
In my late teens, I became conscious of an enormous hypocrisy. As a good atheist, I had been taught never to disregard observable evidence, even if it contradicted a personal belief. Yet I now had an entire body of evidence that I was expected to ignore and suppress. Atheist friends and family would routinely belittle spiritual experiences, either dismissing them as invented, or explaining them with elaborate and improbable scientific theories. No one seemed willing to say “I simply don’t know why these things happen to people.” Ironically, what I first saw as a failure of atheism, I now see as a failure of atheists: if one person had said to me “There is a lot about the way the brain functions that we still don’t understand, but one day we will probably have the technology to measure and explain things like precognition”, my rebellion against my birth-philosophy might have been less angry. Today, I think it’s entirely possible that we will one day have the technology to measure and explain things like precognition. Religion, for me, does not contradict a universe governed by biology and physics.
But this anti-experiential koolaid was not passed out by atheists. It was passed out by fundamentalists. Modern fundamentalism is not an obsession with God, it is an obsession with law. Religion in the eyes of most fundamentalists is a normative, enforceable moral code, not the society of God on earth. Personal spiritual experience suggests a direct connection with the divine, one not subject to the oversight of self-appointed moral guardians. Fundamentalists would love to live in a world where miracles occur only to the stuffily pious, and not to malcontents like me.
I worry that the seeds of this same obsession with law have been planted in the burgeoning atheist movement. The laws in this case may be scientific rather than moral, but they are still laws. No philosophy is an innoculation against human nature, and all humans dislike what they can’t explain. Atheism has the potential to be less boundaried than almost any other worldview, but most atheists are as boundaried as everybody else. This is a problem. I hope the reaction against religious fundamentalism does not begin to resemble what it set out to reject. We could all do with a dose of what Amir Abdel Kader called “enlightened ignorance”, and when we come to questions we can’t answer, tell the truth: I don’t know.