My Almost Atheism (the confession of an orthodox rebel)

"He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. [...] Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief." Is. 53:3-10

I have seen a trend in mainstream Christianity, in all denominations and traditions. It has (perhaps) been an ever-present shadow to the substance of orthodoxy, but our modern realities of media and celebrity have made it more acute. It is in books, podcasts, T.V. and radio programs, blog posts, and even a few movies now and again. It is the siren song of our generation, and I call it "Syrup Christianity," an overly sweet, congealing parody of the traditional Faith. It is a "Christianity" of uncritical optimism, whose marshmallow God of warm fuzzies and easy explanations always makes sure that his real children are tolerating each other and having their "best life now." Yes, Osteen is a popular variant of this strain, but he is hardly alone. There are many others.

There's the "happy church" variety (whether Catholic or charismatic or fundamentalist) where every sermon or homily and every congregant or parishioner has been greased with fake smiles and forced exuberance because everything should be right if you're "right with God." There's also the "comfy doctrine" variety, where either serious reformed types tell you that Calvinism gives us no grounds for tears or anguish (for surely Calvin was not a man of sorrows) or serious radical types tell you that "love wins" in an unqualified, hazy way (for surely our versions of Hell and damnation are the scary concoctions of old curmudgeons).

Then there's the "culture of simplicity" where every Lifeway special or Cloud Ten production shills its cartoonish versions of light and dark, where the good is of the conservative Southern Baptist variety and the evil is some kind of New-Age atheism (and always a real jerk). And there's the "politics of triumphalism," where on the Right an American theocracy is trumpeted with jingoistic fervor, and on the Left the Kingdom of God can only be brought about by a socialist progressive agenda; in either case, legislation and activism are our only salvation.

I have rejected those answers, rejected them because they are all, at bottom, the same thing: "Syrup Christianity". They are all of the faith of easy answers and the eternal sunshine of spotless minds. Theirs is that world called "Perfect" that Walgreens always warned us about. Sorrow, fear, doubt, darkness, despair, death, loss, the insidiousness of evil, and fighting long defeats: these things mean nothing to them, nothing but irritations to be ignored, misrepresentations to be cleared up, or sins to be repented of. It is the religion of Job's friends, and with all due respect to its many adherents, I say a plague on all your houses. I want nothing to do with any of you. You are so unlike Jesus.

I have no patience for any system (either "secular" or "sacred") of life or thinking that makes no room for darkness and evil, real darkness and real evil. I am never more frustrated than when staring into the eyes of bald-faced optimism, with its naive temperament and clueless disposition. Do I believe that all shall be well? Of course: you can't be a Christian and believe otherwise. What I do not believe is that the road to redemption will run smooth or straight from our end, that things are somehow going to get better and better. It is all a lie. "Evil-doers shall wax worse and worse," and the Kingdom of God comes, not with rainbows and rays of summer, but with fire and thunder, and the violence of violent men, and blood pouring from the winepress of God's wrath. Christ will come indeed, but in righteousness to "judge and make war." All weapons will be beat into plowshares, but not until the final slaughter, of which Canaan was but a type and shadow. Apocalypse is our final eucatastrophe.

I am not morbid, and though I carry about a healthy does of pessimism, I am not a pessimist. What I am is someone who takes evil seriously, seriously enough to want real answers for it and solutions to it beyond childish dismissals or excuses. You cannot explain it away, nor is it reducible to soundbites about homosexuals or capitalism. Evil is real, evil hurts, and evil finds a way in. We are called to hate it ("abhor" it), not ignore it. God certainly hates it. As a man, He wept in anguish at death, met corruption with an almost reckless violence, and always carried a note of contempt in His words to not only the Pharisees and Sadducees but even the devil himself in the wilderness. I ask you: is your God big enough to hate evil? Hate it enough to do something about it? Mine is. He has to be.

My stake in this is neither political or even philosophical. Rather, it is deeply personal. For fifteen years, I lived in the same house as a chronically ill person. My mother's diabetes had somehow spawned a mysterious neuropathy that doctors have yet to explain adequately. All they know is this: it is eating away at her nerves, leaving her hands and feet in a paradoxical state of ever-increasing agony and ever-growing numbness. For fifteen years I watched this evil work its malice upon her. For fifteen years, I have seen the tragedy and the horror of the Fall. I've seen her lose everything she loved: teaching, playing the piano, hosting parties, seeing friends, attending church. All was swallowed into the void, and now all she can do is sit, sit, sit, sit, sit. And I do not like it, not one little bit.

How can you dwell in the presence of such suffering and walk away with easy answers about evil? I couldn't. I prayed for her healing everyday, but it never came. She only got worse. I prayed she'd be healthy enough for family events so she could get out and enjoy herself, but she often didn't (and still doesn't). God seemed to abandon her to this fate, and no smirking sentimentalism from the prophets of progress could come close to touching such a thing. In truth, I took them all to be one massive, monstrous joke; or worse, an insult straight at my mother and my heart. The religion of Job's friends is an affront to all Jobs, including my own.

Yet there is one more thing I must say about my Job: she has kept the faith, neither has she charged God foolish with her lips. I can remember, years ago, driving her to one of her numerous doctors. Her foot was in danger of collapse (again) and it needed to be set right. On the way home, I expressed to her my thoughts about her condition. I ended by saying that if anything could make me an atheist (I feared), it would be if she died without ever being healed. She listened to me patiently, sipping on a drink from Sonic, and when I finished she told me that she too had her moments of dark despair and doubt about God's purpose for all this. But she concluded with these words: "God has a plan. Even for pain. Don't let my pain shake your faith. It doesn't shake mine."

From that moment, I knew I could never be an atheist. There could never be an argument good enough, and I defy any skeptic to try. I have found a Faith that faces pain, that can face pain. Without fear, without a blink or flinch or shake. And that is the Faith I want. That is the Faith I love. Not the syrupy "faith" of Modern American Christendom, all pathetic smiles and perfect (or nebulous) explanations, but a Faith whose God has a place and plan for evil and pain. The Faith acquainted with grief and sorrow. The Faith of my mother. The Faith of Jesus, who was stricken, smitten, and afflicted, enduring the cross and its shame, who humbled Himself even unto death. My Jesus knows death, knows pain, knows darkness. He did not deny the dark but walked right into it, screaming up and out into its night like a flare burning blood red, and the darkness could not overcome Him. It has overcome all else except this thing, this one true thing, this new thing, this God-man who heals with His stripes, and was pleased to be bruised, crushed, and put to grief.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

Wriggling in the Crushing Grip of Reason (an aside by Bill Watterson)

On science and religion (and where the two meet):

Atheistic Mysticism (cultural apologetics by an orthodox rebel)

First of all, watch this video:

Second of all, ponder this: Strip away the reassuring baritone tones of the narrator, the indie documentary cinematography, and the emo piano music, and what is really being said here? That stars are made of a certain kind of matter, and that matter was involved in our evolutionary process.

Thus, we have a tangential material connection to impersonal balls of burning gas.

Maybe I'm just dense (like a star), but I missed the part where this gives my life meaning.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

Why Religion Matters to Everyone; Or, The Universal Foundations and Consequences of Belief (as explained by an orthodox rebel)

The follow is a "response paper" I wrote while in grad school. It was during a rhetoric class that dealt with the reliability of texts (specifically rhetorical texts). Aside from a corrosive premise that all things deemed "rhetorical" were inherently propagandic and thus inherently unreliable, one thing that irked me about the class was the assumption that the reliability of religious texts was a issue only to the religious, and that the concerns of religion were of no consequence to the secular. In order to politely disillusion the class and its professor, I wrote the following paper. I present it here with a few, non-fundamental alterations.

If we are to be true critical thinkers, it is necessary to view no text as "off limits" in regard to discussion and critique. In the true spirit of Plato's "double open-endedness," no conclusion or assumption is immune from scrutiny. Everyone's assertions, if they are robust assertions, are up for grabs; this is a fact that we must not forget if we are to be honest and clear in our engagement with the world. That being said, I feel that this view of critical thinking must be bolstered with a necessary caution.

We must not kid ourselves: it is erroneous to assume that the reliability of religious texts is a "landmine" issue solely for the religious, and that somehow the non-religious stand in impunity on the sidelines. This is a false premise; it assumes what it seeks to prove, i.e., that religious texts are unreliable. The fact is that the non-religious (and even the anti-religious) have just as much at stake in the reliability of religious texts as the religious. This is because religious texts in general (and the biblical texts specifically) do not claim to be about religion or religious things. Rather, they claim to be about truth, reality, life and death, right and wrong, i.e., the way things really are and really ought to be. This means that their verification or falsification has consequences for all of us, because we all have some kind of foundational assumptions about what is and ought to be.

Most of the non and anti-religious, however, when considering this issue, do not understand this. Their default position runs something like this: The sincere yet wrong-headed religionist, upon discovering the falsification of their holy writ (upon which their entire worldview was grounded and found sustenance), is indeed in a world of trouble, perhaps more than nonchalant speculation has realized. To have your philosophical underpinnings completely undermined, to have your foundational assumptions on metaphysics, epistemology, and morality completely shattered into a million irreparable fragments and lost to the wind, is a position beyond all nightmares. It is true that some manage to survive such an ordeal and move on to some other philosophy, but history gives us other common responses to such a traumatic event: varying degrees of madness possibly accompanied by suicide. Beliefs are not so easily cast aside.

Beliefs, however, are not just a "religious" thing; they are a human thing. We all believe in something (even if it is in "nothing," like nihilists), and those beliefs/biases/assumptions shape our view of the world and how we should function in it. Moreover, because belief is an inherent human quality, the reversal of the non/anti-religious default position on the reliability of religious texts is an equally viable consideration (though it is oddly less considered).

Let us suppose, then, such a reversal. Let us imagine, instead of a sincere yet wrong-headed religionist, a born and bred, thoroughly modern secularist who has been long schooled in the tradition of his elders, viz., that the Dark Ages began at the birth of Christ and continued to the Enlightenment where mankind was set free from superstition and declared (in the words of Lucretius) that "religion...is trampled underfoot, / and by [this] victory we reach the stars." He has long been taught that religion was nothing more than a concoction of the weak-minded who happened to be in power, and that their chief points of serious doctrine were the flatness of the earth, the smallness of the universe, the number of angels on a pinhead, and other ludicrous assertions. As such, he sincerely believed in the death of God, the unquestionable reliability of empiricism, the infallibility of scientific inquiry, and the closed system of cause and effect that is Nature, whose highest (and only) elements are matter and energy. To him or her, religion has proved itself impotent and has long lost its voice in any and all matters other than those discussed in churches or seminaries, those last remaining cloisters of narrow-mindedness. Let this be our first supposition.

Now, let us additionally suppose that within the lifetime of this sincere secularist, there arises a rather rebellious traditional religionist with a strong head on his shoulders and a penchant for irony. This religionist (with tact and force) rises up and dares to proclaim that any and every religious text is open to rhetorical (and even scientific) scrutiny. Let us also suppose that this rebellious religionist (through long, arduous study and research) releases a seminal work to much controversy because it substantially demonstrates (on the word of "most scholars") the absolute reliability of religious texts. Let this be our second supposition.

If these two suppositions be the case (we are speaking hypothetically, of course), what is our conclusion? What has become of our secularist? He has suffered the same fate as the religionist, because the same cause has befallen him, and thus the same effect is produced: the very foundations of their beliefs (the death of God, etc.) have been shaken to the ground, and they too are left in the same nightmarish position. Though I could (and would) argue that moving from a vacuously atheistic, materialist position to a substantial robust, theistic position would ultimately result in sanity and joy rather than madness and sorrow, let it be enough for now to say that in the initial stages of the annihilation of first principles, the secular and the religious are in the same boat.

The point that we should gather is this: we take the issue of the reliability of religious texts far too lightly and flippantly if we assume some sort of immunity from the consequences of the verification or falsification of religious texts (or arguably any text whatsoever). We all have a stake in the claims of religion, and I would postulate that this is a fact that even the secular realize. It is perhaps true that the religious avidly fear analysis because that analysis may falsify their beliefs, but it is perhaps equally true that the secular fear such an analysis because it may very well verify the beliefs of the religious (and subsequently falsify their own). In other words, the avoidance of analysis (when there is any) is most likely not the result of stubborn ignorance or denial on the part of any party. The avoidance seems far more ecumenical, stemming from a very human, almost religious-like dread of the consequences. It may very well be that, on the one side, the religious quake, "What if I'm proven wrong?" While on the other side (and somehow able to be ignored), the secular fearfully whisper amongst themselves, "What if they're proven right?"

In either case, if we are to be critical thinkers who approach all texts and all views (with their assumptions and conclusions) honestly and openly, we would be wise to remember to tread deliberately yet softly, for the "religion" we trample on could be our own in the end.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011