great
thank for sharing
purps
Thoughts on the Spirituality of Atheism
by nvrgnbk 38 Replies latest jw friends
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GoingGoingGone
Loved this.
Thanks!
GGG
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Clam
Good article Nvr. I've never perceived atheists as "not believing in anything"; in fact their beliefs are often more coherent, indeed purer since they've usually come from within, rather than learnt from rigid external doctrine. This self awareness can I suppose be described as atheistic spirituality. At least that's what I believe.
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nvrgnbk
http://www.spiralnature.com/spirituality/atheism/atheismbasics.html
Atheism: The Basics
By: Psyche
At its simplest theism can be defined as the belief in the existence of at least one god, and atheism as the absence of belief in the existence of any gods. The word comes from the Greek, the pronoun ‘a-‘ meaning ‘without’ and ‘theos meaning ‘god’.
An atheist’s absence of belief may come from a deliberate choice not to believe, or from an inherent inability to believe religious or spiritual doctrine as literally credible. Atheists are not 'in denial' and are not willfully ignoring evidence of gods. It is possible that someone may be atheist by default, having never been exposed to the concept of gods, but I've never encountered this outside of speculation alone.
In discussing the absence of a belief in god or gods the definition of what is meant by 'god' or 'gods' cannot be immediately assumed, as belief systems vary greatly in various religions, philosophies, and personal beliefs. Therefore, before ruffling any feathers, it might be a good idea to discuss what might be implied, as each response is going to be different with each person involved.
Beyond the Judeo-Christian understanding of gods for example, it may be argued that gods exist in a metaphorical sense. For example, that gods dwell within each individual in the mind, in the conscience, or in consciousness itself. An atheist will not likely dispute that gods can exist metaphorically in an individual's mind; the disagreement lies in whether or not these gods can exist or not independently of the mind and outside of human belief.
Another form of theism, called animism, describes natural objects such as stones, trees, rivers or even the universe itself as being spiritual beings, even gods. Atheists don't deny their existence as physical objects, but rather dispute whether or not such objects can be rightly classified as 'gods'.
The absence of a thing cannot be proven by definition, therefore demanding an atheist prove the non-existence of gods is self defeating (so please don’t do it, it’s very dumb). The burden of proof here lies with the theist. If the theist cannot demonstrate that their belief is reasonable and justified, then atheism immediately seems a perfectly reasonable and creditable stance.
Mere disbelief in the truth of a proposition (in this case, the disbelief in the existence of gods) cannot be treated as equivalent to the belief that the proposition is false and that the opposite is true; neither the world nor most individual belief systems work in such strict duality. If one makes a claim and another disbelieves it, it is not necessarily the same as saying that the claim is false. It may be that the preposition was not understood well enough to determine one way or another, or one may lack the means or information to test a claim, or one may simply not care enough to think about it either way. Atheism may be a chosen by default from lack of knowledge, or it can be well reasoned doubt, or otherwise.
There is a purveying assumption that atheism is a non-religious religion, or an anti-religion, when this simply isn’t the case. If we take ‘religion’ to mean ‘a set of beliefs, values and practices, or a cause principle or activity pursued with contentious devotion’ even omitting reference to gods or a ‘higher power’, atheism still does not qualify as a religion.
Atheists vary greatly in their beliefs and attitudes and it the misconception that atheism means more than what it does is common, and very false. Using our above simplistic definition, atheism is the absence of belief of the existence of any gods. There are no unified beliefs among atheists tying them all together beyond the fact that no atheist believes in a god or gods. No further beliefs about politics, philosophy, society, social conditions, science, religion, etc. are implied. When you know someone is an atheist, all you know is that they do not profess belief in any gods.
Essentially, the difference between atheism and theism has no implicit moral or intellectual significance. The difference lies in the methodological difference between the application of skepticism, reason, and observable physical reality (science) and fantasy, intuition, and tradition in theological matters.
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nvrgnbk
In Awe of Everything An atheist's sense of spirituality
There is an experience which is common to every religious belief system. It is the sense of coming face-to-face with something far greater and immeasurably more vast than yourself, glimpsing the essence of reality and being overawed by it. In the Buddhist tradition, it is often referred to as satori; Christian charismatics call it the sense of God's presence or the Holy Spirit moving in one's heart; while a devotee of a mystical sect might refer to it as union with the Absolute. More commonly, it is simply referred to as the human sense of spirituality. Whatever one chooses to call it, though, it is a powerful and profoundly moving experience, one which often has long-lasting effects on a person's view of the world. The reality of this occurrence may well be a major reason accounting for the popularity and power of religion even today.
Some readers undoubtedly will have noticed the word "reality" in the previous sentence. That is not a mistake or a careless phrasing; I fully agree that these experiences are real. I should know, because I occasionally have them myself.
That might, at first, seem like a strange admission for an atheist to make. But the crucial point is that I agree with theists that the feelings associated with these experiences are real; we merely differ on what causes them. I maintain that love, joy, wonder, awe, and all the other feelings humans experience are caused by electrochemical activity within the brain, although I do not believe that this makes them any less real or meaningful. However, the physical basis for these feelings is surveyed in "A Ghost in the Machine", and so will not be further discussed here. The topic of this essay will instead be how atheism can in fact be a far more spiritual experience than any religion.
Imagine the first human communities, the first civilizations to arise in the history of our species. The planet they lived on would have been very different from the one we are used to today. From space, it would have been utterly darkened on the night side, without a single glimmer of light to suggest that it was inhabited. The night sky as these people would have seen it, pure and dark, is a thing almost unimaginable to many people today. In the present era, those who dwell in large cities can see a few dozen stars at night; those who live in suburban areas, probably a few hundred. These people would have seen thousands, each one as sharp and brilliant as diamonds spilled across the firmament. On clear nights, the Milky Way itself must have been visible, the plane of the galaxy like a pale misty arch spanning the sky. To lie back and take it all in must have induced vertigo, as if the cosmos was not overhead but below, a starry abyss into which one could fall and be lost forever.
The awesome majesty of the night sky would have been only the most obvious reminder of something these people must have known very well: they were largely at the mercy of an indifferent and often hostile universe, fearful of forces beyond their control. In light of this fact, and given a basic knowledge of human psychology, what happened next is not difficult to understand. They created, largely unconsciously, a system to give them the feeling of control over the world they craved - a belief system in which nature was ruled over by spirits and deities that could be assuaged, bribed, or propitiated. As this theology evolved over time, it added a new proposition from which people could derive further comfort and feelings of control: the gods care about us, they are on our side, and regardless of appearances, they will ensure that things turn out right for us in the end.
For the most part, this pattern has continued today. Though we have had some degree of success at bringing the forces of nature under our influence, for the average person life is still a great struggle in the shadow of events we rarely understand and can even more rarely control. The universe is too big, too impersonal, too difficult to understand. When people put it on one side of the scale and themselves on the other - because the ego, whether consciously or not, tends to judge all things in relation to itself - it does not balance. They feel small, lost, afraid. To counterbalance the scale, people seize on the grand assertion: "The creator of the universe is interested in me personally!"
The effects of such a belief have reverberated throughout history. The ancient Greeks put heroes and gods in the night sky, as if its only purpose was to act as a larger mirror of our daily lives. Christianity went even farther, and for centuries clerics declared the Earth to be the unmoving center of the universe, the axis of creation around which everything else revolved. Those who spoke out against this notion were threatened with, and sometimes actually suffered, imprisonment, torture and execution, with such fury did the church react to anyone who dared to suggest that human beings were anything less than completely superior. In fact, almost every religion human beings have ever invented has had a core belief that humanity was in some way central to the universe. Yet for all their exaltations of humility, how many of them ever imagined that we were but an infinitesimal part of an enormous cosmos, utterly insignificant to the running of the whole?
This, then, is the spirituality of theism: God made the world for us to live in and watches over us from his heaven; he cares about us and will save us in the end, so long as we worship him and remain appropriately respectful of his power. No matter how bad things may seem, he has a plan, and it is our lot to have faith in him and trust that all will work out for the best.
If this is the spirituality of a theist, what constitutes the spirituality of an atheist? To be sure, some people, and not just theists, would regard that as an oxymoron. But I do not. While spirituality is commonly defined in terms of belief in supernatural beings, I believe there is a better and more fundamental definition: a sense of the sacred, of the things that are highly valuable and worthy of reverence. In sum, I consider spirituality to refer to the sense of awe and wonder, a recognition of the deeper and more profound aspects of life. In this sense, an atheist can be at least as spiritual as any theist.
What, then, speaks to an atheist's sense of the spiritual? There is no universal answer to this question, but in my personal experience, we can find awe and wonder in the most unexpected and, often, the most simple places. As small a thing as it seems, I have always enjoyed, on a winter night, watching snow falling through lamplight. Against the darkened sky the falling snow is almost invisible, but where it passes through the light it seems to glow, making the edge of the light visible in turn. Of course, it is impossible to watch every falling snowflake; there is so much data that the visual system is overwhelmed, and the result is merely white noise, evanescent patterns that are gone as soon as they are created. It is beautiful, almost holy to watch the snow silently fall.
But just because it is possible to find beauty in the small things does not mean that the greater things do not hold a power and a majesty all their own. During clear, dark nights, when I look up at the endless starry infinity and try to hold that entire expanse in my head, and discover anew that this is an impossible task - at such times, I experience a genuine sense of awe. The universe we live in is a far greater and more incredible place than we can imagine, or can imagine.
No matter how familiar the fact is, I still find it astounding to realize that each of those points of light in the night sky is a sun - from ordinary yellow stars like our own to hot blue supergiants and ancient swollen red giants, and every kind in between. But our universe holds more wonders beyond this. There are great nebulae light-years across, misty stellar cradles where newborn stars emerge from disks of gas and dust. Some of those distant twinkles are not just stars but entire galaxies like our own, island universes of hundreds of billions of suns in the shapes of enormous rotating spirals and dense globular clouds and great starry walls. And scattered throughout this cosmos are countless worlds, planets born of the heavy elements forged in the hearts of massive suns and blown back into space in those suns' violent death throes, enriching the interstellar medium with a wealth of new possibilities. At least one of those worlds bears self-aware, intelligent life - at least one, and possibly many more.
And in comparison to all this, what are we? What is the place of humanity in the grand scheme of things?
There is a photo, taken in 1990 by one of the Voyager spacecraft from the edge of interstellar space, over three billion miles from home. As it sailed away out of the solar system, never to return, it pointed its camera backwards and took one last picture of the planet from which it came. In the picture, the Earth is a single lonely twinkle, a pale blue dot against a background of all-enveloping darkness. A golden sunbeam illuminates our planet, as if it were a single dust speck floating by itself in a huge drafty hall.
The longer one looks at this picture, the more profound is the realization: that tiny, far-off glimmer is our home. Our lives, as well as the lives of everyone we know or have ever heard about, took place there. All of history - all the madness and the chaos, all the struggle and the bloodshed, all the petty everyday difficulties and all the vast conflicts, all the crushing losses and marvelous triumphs of the human species - took place on that pale blue dot, affecting nothing beyond it, while all around us the cosmos continues on its vast revolutions, unperturbed.
This knowledge, paradoxically, is both an uplifting and profoundly humbling experience, revealing our utter insignificance and simultaneously elevating our lives beyond measure. In our telescopes, we see light that was emitted long before the Earth ever existed. While it traveled across space, our solar system formed from a disk of dust and gas, our sun ignited and began to shine, our planet coalesced and began to travel in its orbit, and life arose and diversified over billions of years until it became able to know itself. When I contemplate these things, this is when I experience wonder. We are stardust, part of the cosmos that is our home. We are, in a sense, the universe examining itself. From our tiny and remote corner of the cosmos, we have gazed across the light-years, unraveled the natural laws that hold on the very largest of scales, and traced our own origins all the way back to the Big Bang. How can such profound understanding not instill in us a sense of awe?
The truth is far more inspiring and powerful than religious mythology. Knowing that the cosmos was not made just for us opens up whole new vistas of wonder and mystery - it makes it all the more surprising and amazing that we are here regardless. Our own existence, and our consciousness of that existence, is a thing so incredible and strange that it alone qualifies as the greatest miracle in our experience. Our life is a glorious mystery, and only by living with our eyes on the ground can we ignore this fact. When one truly understands this, one stands in awe of everything - and that is the spirituality of an atheist.
The spirituality of theism, by contrast, is very human-centered, arrogantly anthropocentric. It postulates that everything that exists does so only for our benefit, that the universe is ultimately subservient to us. It imagines that this universe of a hundred billion galaxies each made up of a hundred billion stars was created for the sake of one star, and that that one star in turn was created only so that it could warm a planet a millionth of its size, and that that entire planet and its gloriously complex four-and-a-half-billion year history of life was created only for the sake of the beings who currently bestride its surface. While astronomers look out into space and see the titanic deaths of stars and the collisions of entire galaxies, theism claims that the life of a single man or the formation of a tiny fiefdom hundreds or thousands of years ago was the most important thing that ever happened in the history of the cosmos. How could this view not rob life of its beauty and its mystery? Instead of viewing the cosmos as an awesome mystery awaiting us, a distant frontier we have yet to discover, this outlook makes it more like scenery, an arbitrarily contrived puzzle made just to keep us busy. Instead of viewing our conscious existence as an incredible gift, this outlook naturally leads a person to expect it and take it for granted. The truth is that an atheistic worldview is at least as compatible with the human sense of spirituality as any religious worldview is, and by no means denies the vital sense of awe and wonder that gives meaning and worth to human life. All atheism denies is that we need any invented miracles to give importance to the genuine miracles that surround us every moment of our lives.
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blueviceroy
Hmmmm,,, You sound an awfull lot like a true believer to me
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nvrgnbk
Hmmmm,,, You sound an awfull lot like a true believer to me
You watch your language, mister!
LOL!
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eclipse
- As an atheist, I believe love is something that can be broken down to being a series of electrochemical reactions caused by sensory input - - but is that all, and do I treat it that way?
- As an atheist, I believe music is something that can be broken down to being a series of notes put in the correct mathematical order of rhythm to spark the pattern recognition part of our brain - - but is that all, and do I treat it that way?
- As an atheist, I believe art is something that can be broken down to being forms, outlines and colors that spark the pattern recognition part of our brain - - but is that all, and do I treat it that way?
- As an atheist, I believe life evolved in small steps from random mutation and natural selection, that the most fit survives, and that it wasn't created by a loving God - - but is that all, and do I treat it as if it was any less worth?
No.
Love gives me a variety of emotions and experiences in its various forms and stages, which I can share with others (and/or a significant other).
Music gives me a variety of emotions and experiences in its various forms, which I can share with others (and/or a significant other).
Art gives me a variety of emotions and experiences in its various forms, which I can share with others (and/or a significant other).
Looking at various life forms gives me a variety of emotions and experiences, which I can share with others (and/or a significant other).
I can cry, I can laugh, I can get angry, I can be sad, I can be happy.
It's the spice of life. I think this is my spirituality.
-Awakened.
That was beautifully written, awakened. I agree with it 100%. Great thought provoking article, nvr
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nvrgnbk
Spiritual Fire An atheist's view of love
Some theists think it a very clever argument to ask an atheist if they believe in the existence of love. After all, the thinking runs, no one can deny that love exists - but it is impossible to prove that love exists. But if atheists believe in one thing that cannot be proven to exist, how can they in good conscience reject other things, such as God, merely because they cannot be proven to exist either?
Now, I do not deny the existence of love - far from it. But I do not believe there is anything contradictory in accepting the existence of love without believing in the existence of God. The analogy fails because the two are dissimilar in a fundamental way, and so cannot be compared.
Before saying any more, I should make it clear that I have never argued, nor do I believe, that science is the only way of understanding, viewing, or perceiving the world. I do not claim that things that cannot be studied scientifically must not exist. However, I do believe and will argue that we must investigate a subject scientifically if we wish to obtain objective, reliable information about it. As just about anyone will readily admit, objective and reliable information about love is essentially non-existent, and objective, reliable, scientific information about God is entirely non-existent. But that is where the crucial difference lies: for one of these, this is just as we should expect, but for the other, it is not at all what we should expect.
By its nature, love is subjective, a personal mental state. When I experience it, it exists only in my own mind, and my personal perceptions and sensations of it and about it define its existence. Since it is not supposed to exist anywhere but in my mind, when I do feel it in my mind, that alone is evidence enough that it exists.
But God, if he is as the monotheists say, is not subjective but objective. If he exists, then presumably, he does not just exist in my head, and his being and nature are not defined by what I think about them. If he exists, it would be perfectly appropriate to expect evidence of that fact independent of thoughts in people's heads. Subjective sensations can be evidence for a subjective experience, but not for an objective being.
In plain language: love is something that's not supposed to exist anywhere but in personal mental states, which are inherently unverifiable. It would be unreasonable to demand evidence for it, and indeed, it would be unnecessary. Everyone has experienced love; everyone knows what it is and what it feels like. A claim to be in love is not inherently extraordinary, and there is no special reason to doubt it.
But God is typically not defined as an inner mental state, but as an actual, objective being with an existence independent of what anyone thinks. There is every reason to believe that there would be empirical evidence of the existence of such a being, and every reason to demand it - because the existence of God is an extraordinary claim. It is not in accord with everyday experience. To all appearances the cosmos runs by itself, guided only by the regularities of natural law. There is no obvious sign of an overarching intelligence, and even those theists who believe in miracles would probably admit that they believe them to be vanishingly rare. It is only right to ask for evidence, and strong evidence, before accepting the existence of a being whose qualities clash so drastically with observed principles of reality.
As a backup tactic, some theists might say that I have already conceded the argument regardless, merely by admitting the existence of love. After all, it is commonly claimed that "God is love," and so to say that one exists is to say that the other exists - or so the thinking goes. Needless to say, I dispute this. To equate an object or idea with God is not to imbue that object or idea with all the qualities traditionally associated with God. Point at love if you want, and call it your god - but I won't thereby admit that it's transcendent, all-powerful, all-knowing, the creator of the universe, the judge of the dead, or even that it exists independently of humans. No matter what one chooses to name it, it will remain nothing more or less than the same old sloppy, embarrassing, confusing, uplifting, wonderful feeling it is and always has been. As the saying goes, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
The same applies for every item or concept - truth, justice, reality, and so on - used in this misguided class of argument in an attempt to define God into existence. I won't deny that a particular quality exists simply because someone names it God, but neither will I worship it, nor will I admit that traditional theism is in any way confirmed thereby.
So what is this atheist's view of love? In my view, love is an evolutionary impulse, the result of millions of years of natural selection acting on our genes, subtly shaping us to instill within us the desire and the drive to reproduce and raise families and so begin a new round of evolution. In my view, love is an electrochemical phenomenon, the result of cascades of hormones and neurotransmitters exciting patterns of signaling in certain regions of the brain.
But in my view, love is also a sublime sensation, loftiest and most spiritual of the emotions, a feeling that can move us to produce humanity's most beautiful works of art and acts of compassion, or provoke us to our darkest crimes of passion. Simply put, it is one of the things that makes us human, and for all the chaos and heartbreak it causes, our lives would be much duller and less wonderful without it. It is one of the things that makes life worth living. It is the source of our most crushing miseries and our most blissful happiness; and despite all the struggles and conflict and failures, when it works it is the most beautiful and powerful feeling there is.
There is no paradox in proclaiming both that love has a physical basis and also that it is real and meaningful. As argued in "Life of Wonder", just because we understand how something works does not make it any less special or genuine. Love is an inherent part of human nature, part of the lives of atheists and theists alike, and we do not need the approval of a supernatural being to confer legitimacy on it or on any of our other feelings. It is meaningful precisely because it is meaningful to us.
But what, exactly, is love? How are we to define it? Love takes many forms, and no one definition can perfectly express all of them. Nevertheless, there are many definitions that capture different aspects of what love is: the state where the happiness of another is equal to your own; the act of giving someone the power to hurt you out of trust that they will not use it; the desire to always be together with someone; the appreciation of a thing based on its unique qualities. But the essence, the true nature, of love is ultimately beyond words, indescribable, like all qualia. The most that can be said is that we know it when we feel it. However, there is one possible definition that I feel comes closer than any other: the feeling - and I use this word with no theistic connotations intended - of having been blessed. To be so happy, about nothing in particular, that you find yourself laughing for no reason; to view something so beautiful and spectacular that your breath involuntarily quickens and your heart surges in your chest; to wake up next to your partner in the morning and feel amazed that someone so wonderful would want to share a life with you - that is what it means to be in love.
Of course, for every exhilarating peak, there is an equally dark and lonely valley. It is undeniably true that the happiness love can produce when it works is matched in equal measure by the misery it can produce when it fails, and sometimes it seems as if it goes unreciprocated far more often than not. Some might even ask whether love has, on balance, caused more harm than good in this world. Might we be better off without it? Would our lives be less troublesome and less depressing if they were more placid and even, without the dizzying highs and lows of love?
My answer to this question is that love is far more than the desire for partnership, as important as that is. Love undergirds every noble human endeavor and inspires us to achievements that no lesser motivation could have produced. From the love of nature, to the love of knowledge that inspires science, to the love of freedom that brought about open and democratic societies and the patriots willing to fight for them, to the love of beauty that produces great works of art, literature and architecture, to the love for all feeling creatures commonly known as empathy, all that is good in this world ultimately comes from love. Were we to give it up, we would be giving up humanity itself.
To those who are devout religious believers, atheism may seem comfortless, even frightening, because it proposes to strip away the illusions that so many have grown to depend on and take for granted. To people who have never known life without these beliefs, losing them may at first seem like being cast adrift at sea on a stormy night. However, the truth is that in this transition we do not lose anything worth holding onto, and we gain much that is good as well. Free of the strictures of organized religion, we become empowered to set our own purpose and find our own meaning and significance in life. And an atheist's life can still be full of love - for family, for friends, for life itself - as well as all of the other things that make our lives worthwhile. Being in love is not part of being religious; it is simply part of being human. It is a birthright that belongs to all of us alike.
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Madame Quixote
We aren't as alone as we think we are, each of us locked away in some soul-walnut.
Truly true and funny!