The Reason Rally

About the Reason Rally this weekend: it is disingenuous for atheists to think that by rejecting one axiom, they have reason on their side. Reason is a tool that everybody has access to. It is a powerful servant but a lousy master, since it wants nothing, cares for nothing, and wills nothing into being. There is reason behind rejecting theism, but there is reason behind rejecting oysters, and ultimately both reasons are aesthetic (unless one has a shellfish allergy).

To use an analogy from mathematics, believing in God is like using the Axiom of Choice, and rejecting God is like rejecting the Axiom of Choice. The majority of mathematicians embrace the Axiom of Choice, even though it is fraught with logical paradoxes, the same way that the majority of people are theistic, even though theism is fraught with logical paradoxes. Rejecting the Axiom of Choice provides its own sets of challenges, and makes it hard to engage with the majority of mathematicians who use it, when discussing mathematics governed by the Axiom of Choice. Rejecting theism makes it challenging to engage in ontological issues with the majority who are theistic. Ultimately, the existence of God is axiomatic, as it is unprovable, and for a theist, a first ontological principle.

In mathematics, there is a conceit that all of mathematics can be based on a set of axioms called ZFC, or the Zermelo-Frankel axioms, with the Axiom of Choice. Some try to build all of mathematics based on ZF¬C, or the Zermelo-Frankel axioms without the Axiom of Choice, because they regard those paradoxes that come with the Axiom of Choice as a refutation of the Axiom of Choice. Right now, it is very hard to be a ZF¬C mathematician. It might not always be so difficult, but currently the Axiom of Choice permeates a lot of mathematics, including algebra, analysis, measure theory, geometry, topology, set theory, logic, and without it, it is harder to do math. I see atheism as parallel to ZF¬C. It challenges an assumption that a lot of people live by. Those who evangelize atheism are demanding that people abandon a basic assumption about the way existence works.

There are brilliant atheists and stupid atheists. There are compassionate atheists and cruel atheists. There are moral victories and atrocities committed by atheists just as there are by theists. I don't believe that atheists should be discriminated against at their workplaces, in acquiring housing, or in their daily lives, and I am sorry if atheists feel oppressed, and will do what I can to help alleviate their oppression wherever appropriate. One big assumption of the Reason Rally is that there are many atheists who are living closeted lives as atheists. The assumption is that there are many people who would be vocal atheists, but are afraid of losing their jobs and families if they "come out" as atheists.  As people who put their trust in reason and science, I'm sure they have sociological data to back up their claims, which I encourage them to publish. I feel sympathy for these people, assuming they exist in the numbers claimed by their vocal advocates. Nobody should deny their natures because of outward pressure to conform. They are justified in convening and encouraging like-minded others to join them.

But if they think they have a monopoly on reason merely by rejecting the existence of God, they forfeit the very reason they claim to monopolize.

Truth and Fact

I wrote to Andrew Sullivan, and he used what I wrote in a blog post. This was in my original email:

As my friend, Dr. James Tresner says, there is a difference between truth and fact, and fundamentalism and fanaticism stems from a confusion between the two. Evolution is a fact. The story of the Fall is true. Interestingly, the Fall is treated very differently by Muslims, Jews, and Christians, who each have their own truth about the Fall. Religious truths can differ from poetical truths, but both truths resonate in the person who contemplates the truth in question. The legends of Hamlet, Luke Skywalker, and Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker are true, even though none of them are factual (although the existence of Amleth of Denmark was most likely a fact, if Saxo Grammaticus is to be believed). Forcing the Fall to be factual is crazy, and makes for craziness. When believers try to force fact to succumb to truth, or force truth to succumb to fact, they can leave a trail of blood in their wake.

The sign of a civilized person is to allow others to have different truths than themselves, and to respect the truths of others, even when they differ from their own, especially when that respect is reciprocated.

Ignorance is ignorance of fact. A Pashtun soldier who does not know how to count to ten is ignorant. Superstition is ignorance of truth. People who think their Creator created their daughters with flawed genitalia that require clitorectomies or worse in order to be presentable are superstitious. Fanaticism is confusing the two and insisting that others do as well. David Barton is a fanatic, as was Lenin. Notice that the fundamentalist and the militant Atheist both confuse truth with fact, the fundamentalist by insisting that truth overwhelm fact, and the militant Atheist by insisting that fact overwhelm truth. Neither, usually, have solid epistemological grasp of truth or fact.

On another blog, this quote, selectively edited, has sparked a new discussion.
On that blog, I wrote:

I am the writer of the quote listed as “Sullivan’s reader.” Jerry quotes me partially, cherry-picking that portion of my comment that supports the argument that Sullivan is an idiot, and removing the rest. This is intellectually disingenuous. A defense that the mental contortions of religious believers is equally mentally disingenuous does not mean that selectively editing what someone wrote in order to win an argument is not disingenuous.

I am not a Christian. I blog a lot about belief and atheism. While personally a theist, I feel at home among atheists and agnostics as long as they are not antitheist, and therefore hostile to my personal practice. I regard the story of existence from the Big Bang, through the formation of the sun and the earth, through the evolution of life on earth and the emergence of humanity to be a Creation Story more profound than that in the Bible. I have a math and science education, and my work is in medical software. I have never read this blog previous to someone notifying me that I got quoted here.

I place value in spiritual progression, which is hard to define. I would regard our consciousnesses as evolving over time, and just as vertebrates would be unimaginable in a world of blue-green algae, the further scope of higher consciousness is unimaginable to those who dwell in the righteous indignation of bivalent value systems (us vs. them). If you asked a paleolithic hunter-gatherer ten millennia ago to describe a skyscraper, they would have trouble doing so. Similarly, humans have always had trouble describing the future evolution of consciousness. That narrative is deeply flawed, and has often led to brutal ideological wars. At my current level of understanding, it makes subjective sense for me to work with the God metaphor in analyzing the trajectory of consciousness, both personal and global. I do not insist that anyone else does, except insofar as to show how it has been useful to me. The Christian metaphor does not make sense to me, and I don’t use it. I often find in conversations with antitheists that they argue with my religious beliefs as if they were Christian, projecting Christian belief onto my belief as if Christianity were the only possible theism. I think that is sloppy.

Jerry’s omissions in quoting me are striking.

Most of the posters vehemently object to any distinction between fact and truth. I call this a flat epistemology. It flattens truth until it is congruent with fact. My understanding is that truth and fact overlap, but are not congruent. As a theist, my understanding is theocentric. As annoying as that might be for an atheist who wants to argue with me, I cannot come up with a definition of truth that excludes Deity, just as I cannot adhere to an ontology that excludes Deity. Truth to me is a bridge between ontology and epistemology, whereas fact is entirely epistemological (and mostly phenomenological). When William Preston writes about Masonic ritual "imprint[ing] upon the memory wise and serious truths," he does not mean that it adds to the phenomenological data gathered in the mind of the candidate. Freemasonry depends upon the distinction between fact and truth, since Masonic legend contains many factually untrue propositions (which has often driven Masonic historians to despair), none of which falsify Freemasonry.

Two things about the New Atheism that annoy me

I've been trying to figure out I find so annoying about the New Atheism (a la Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, et al), and I think it boils down to two things. The first is the naive assumption promoted by New Atheism that reason is inherently superior to gnosis, that reason is inherently good and inherently improves the morality of its adherents, and that a profession of the supremacy of reason somehow trumps the irrational stirrings of the Unconscious and Subconscious minds. There is a certain assumption I'm going to label as the Psychoanalytic Assumption, not because it's only found in psychoanalysis, but because it's inherent in the psychoanalytical model of the psyche. The Psychoanalytic Assumption is that humans in their natural state are possessed with irrational neuroses, urges, presuppositions and prejudices, totally irrational and totally out of control of the individual. Consciousness, in this assumption, is a glimmer of sunlight on the surface of a very deep lake, most of which is too deep to receive much sunlight, and depths are stirred by consciousness roughly as much as the sunlight stirs the water.

The New Atheists propose that a profession of the supremacy of reason somehow obliterates the deep irrationality that drives each of us. In the past, there have been those who have made a similar profession who have devoted themselves to the study of logic and its fallacies, with a deep commitment to root out illogical presuppositions in their thoughts and behavior. The New Atheists promote no such study among themselves nor among those whom they would choose to persuade. While some of the authors I have noted above might have made such a study, their followers never claim to. Those in the past who have made such a study have never managed to persuade whole masses of people to initiate a similar study, and a bland profession of "I believe in science and the power of reason over the forces of superstition" does nothing to combat the inner irrationality at the core of each human being.

In the Jewish tradition, there is a model of the human psyche that contains a yetzer ha-ra or evil advisor, and a yetzer ha-tov or good advisor, who battle each other for your soul using your actions as their battlefield. When you compromise your ethical standards, the yetzer ha-ra scores a victory, and when you stick to your ethical standards in the face of temptation, the yetzer ha-tov scores a victory. Total victory for the yetzer ha-ra is a degenerate sinner totally lacking in self-control, dignity, or moral purpose. Total victory for the yetzer ha-tov is a saint, a tzaddik.

In the Christian tradition, one struggles with sin, and uses Christ as a lifeline to be delivered from sin. In Islam, the internal jihad is a lifelong struggle to do good and reject evil (as opposed to the blasphemous interpretation of the word jihad among militants). In Buddhism, one rejects maya and embraces dharma. It is an assumption of mine that this sort of selection process can be done without invoking deity, although in my own practice, I need to have my Deity in the model. In all such models, there is a methodology for coming to terms with the dangerous and irrational stirrings within the soul, and a method for choosing, of one's one free will (with or without Divine assistance) to embrace virtue and reject vice. There is nothing inherently theistic about this model, although those who choose a theistic version often find that adding Deity to their model assists them more than leaving Deity out.

But New Atheists, as far as I'm aware, don't even try to address the lifelong struggle to live a virtuous life. They just assume that evil comes from faith and superstition, and rejecting both, and professing the supremacy of reason is sufficient to lead a virtuous life.

The other thing about New Atheism that annoys me is the blanket assumption that ideology, and all of the toxic things that come with ideology, is only toxic if it comes with a religious core, and that, conversely, all professions of faith are among the most pernicious manifestations of ideology. It is the classic Straw Man argument, where they despise the harm that ideology can cause, but instead of combating ideology, they combat religion, and create a new ideology to do it. Their ideology is just as pernicious as the ideologies they reject. The irony is that by pushing their ideology, they increase the number and toxicity of ideologues in the world. They would do better to recognize that toxic ideology is their enemy, and attack bad ideologies rather than all professions of religion everywhere in the world. Should they insist on limiting themselves to anti-clerical activism, they would be considerably more effective if they were to attack the ideologies within religions, rather than the religions themselves and thereby tarring everyone with the same brush, regardless of how pernicious the ideology of the individual religious adherent.

A Mature Concept of God

When we are children, we are given a description of God at about the same level of sophistication as the description given to us of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. As we get older, the contradictions in the Santa Claus story become too much for us to continue to believe in as a literal truth: no man could live at the North Pole, and in a single evening, enter through the chimney of every house of children that believed in him and deliver gifts while they sleep. We figure out that the Tooth Fairy gives our friends different sums of money that he gives us, and we notice that both the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus has our mother’s or father’s handwriting. Similarly, our childish version of God falls apart. Why did God allow our cat to run in the street and get killed? Why did our schoolmate die of leukemia? Why do bullies go unpunished? Why does my teacher take a sadistic pleasure in humiliating me in front of the whole class, and get away with it? Why do children who did nothing wrong get molested and abused, going to bed hungry night after night? Why doesn’t God protect me from these things? How can God be simultaneously omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and omnibenevolent in a world populated with humans who possess free will, and where evil exists?

When we lose our childish version of God, what happens? Some give up on God completely, and become atheists. If they really believed as children in the childish version of God, this loss can be very bitter. Some people never question their childish version of God, and become the crudest kind of fundamentalists. But most religious adults, just as they learn that their parents are only human, and make mistakes sometimes, learn that God is very different than our first naïve conception of God. If we are fortunate, we regain or never lose our intimacy with God, but we also realize that God can be very remote from the world of actions. God isn’t Superman; not weaker, just different. If we never evolve beyond the childish version of God, we remain stunted regardless of whether or not we remain religious.

The God of adults is incredibly difficult to describe, and the mature theology of a myriad of religions over the course of millennia struggles in this description. Too many descriptions either insult our intelligence, or are too ephemeral and abstract to hold in the mind. It is because of this that so many people left to decide on their own become either atheists or agnostics. I regard this skepticism as more healthy than an adult belief in a childish God that borders on idolatry.

I know God exists because I feel God’s unconditional love for me and I daily experience God actively sustaining my existence, showering me with providence. I know the limitations of human intelligence, consciousness, empathy and power. I experience fleeting glimpses of a higher intelligence that created the Universe and all things in existence; a higher consciousness that invites me to share in elevated peak experiences, epiphanies, insights, revelations and synchronicities; a higher empathy that feels all the sorrows and joys that humans feel and shares our emotions with us without being consumed by them, and loves us when we are deeply flawed and yearning for redemption; and a higher power that fuels quasars, and sustains a droplet dangling from a bent blade of grass and the microcosm of myriad living creatures swimming in the droplet.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the British Mandate of Palestine, which became the State of Israel, wrote:

“Atheism (heresy) comes as a cry from the depths of pain to redeem man from narrow and alien straights—to raise him up from the darkness of the letters and aphorisms to the light of ideas and feelings until faith finds a place to stand in the center of morality. Atheism has the right of temporary existence because it is needed to digest the filth adhered to faith for the lack of intellect and service.”

This is a fascinating idea. Atheism despises idolatry even more than any religion, and idolatry is absolutely unacceptable to any real monotheist. If you worship anything that isn't God, you are an idolater. Rabbi Kook would prefer an atheist to an idolater: even though he regarded atheism as a grave sin, he regarded idolatry as an even graver sin.

Two more quotes immediately spring to mind, one from a contemporary atheist, and one from a Hasidic rebbe.

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." — Stephen F. Roberts

And:

“Once, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev saw the town apostate approaching. With a loving smile, he drew near him and embraced him: ‘Don’t worry,’ he told him. ‘The God whom you don’t believe in, I don’t believe in either.’” (From a Chabad website)

Stephen Roberts is performing the virtue of idol-smashing that the Prophet Elijah did before him. But he suffers from the arrogance particular to many contemporary intellectuals. He assumes that the believer does not understand his own process, and that Mr. Roberts understands the believer better than the believer understands himself. Talk to a college freshman who has had their first serious complicated idea penetrate their brain-pan, and they will project their previous ignorance onto everyone they meet, and assume that nobody understands their new idea (which usually isn't their creation) but themselves, and possibly their teachers and comrades who share their idea. If you happen to run into one of them in the fulmination of their fervor, it will not matter that you have read the same books that have inspired them as long as you do not entirely agree with their slant on this idea. You are ignorant and they alone have wisdom. People let down by the failure of their childhood conception of God, who reject that god as an adult, often suffer from such a close-minded zeal. People who cling to the failing childhood conception of God as it fails have a similar close-minded zeal.

Roberts assumes that we dismiss false gods because they are rivals to our false god. If all gods are imaginary, then there really is no difference between any two such imaginary gods. He foresees a day in which we contemplate why we don't worship any of the myriad of fetishes that people have bowed to before, and realize that our current worship is similar idolatry, that worship of any kind is idolatry. He believes that when we understand this, we will abandon our silly attachment to the concept of Deity and join him in enlightened atheism. He cannot conceive of a concept of Deity more mature than that of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

Rabbi Levi Yitzchak, on the other hand, understands that we require a concept of God mature enough to withstand our intellect’s full range; a God worthy of worship and praise. Worshiping anything less than this is idolatry. Elsewhere, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak takes God to task for the suffering of the Jewish people, even putting God on trial during Yom Kippur and acting as the prosecutor. He has faith that God can withstand such a trial, and a god who cannot is not worth worshiping. A mature conception of Deity can withstand the question of theodicy (why does a loving God allow evil to exist?), the internal contradictions of Scripture, and one can find value and meaning in a faith built on such a conception. It strikes me that both the antitheist and the fundamentalist cannot imagine that such a mature conception is possible.

The Error of Antitheism

Originally posted on October 19th, 2009

September 30th was Blasphemy Day, a day chosen by a small subset of the atheist community to challenge the notion of sacredness. To quote one of the organizers, “There must be nothing sacred in a logical world, because for something to be sacred it would have to be left a mystery, and if you don’t want to know, you are not logical.”

The day was chosen to coincide with the anniversary of the Danish cartoons in 2005 that were seen by some as mocking the Islamic religion, and were received with rioting and great anger by many Muslims. People died in these riots. The level of anger astonished many here in the West. Since then, the UN has had discussions about making blasphemy an international crime. As an American, the idea that freedom of speech might be curtailed around the world is chilling. International blasphemy laws also infringe on religious liberties. After all, the Catholic Church regarded the King James Bible as blasphemous when it first came out, and the Church of England regarded the Douay Bible as blasphemous. And plenty of Christians today regard Today’s New International Version as blasphemous. Should these translations, used in religious services throughout the English-speaking world, be outlawed?

The organizers of Blasphemy Day do not merely want to preserve the right to form one’s own opinion on spiritual matters, however. They assert that blasphemy is a moral imperative: “Blaspheming the sacred is an obligation that every logical person must embrace.”

The author of the above quotes does not distinguish between critical analysis and blasphemy, and I find that really disturbing. There is a critical facility missing in the author’s argument that betrays the great error indicative of all hostile antitheism.

Underlying the assumptions of the vast majority of those who are hostile to spirituality is that no higher consciousness exists than everyday waking consciousness; the voice one hears in one’s head pretty much constantly when one is not asleep. In the Kabbalah, this notion is called Malkuth (מלכות), or the Kingdom, and forms the base of the Tree of Life. This is the ordinary state of consciousness we find ourselves in most of the time. The agnostic wonders if this is all there is. The atheist asserts that this is all there is, and the antitheist denies anyone else any other form of consciousness.

How do these three attitudes play out? The agnostic is open to higher forms of consciousness, but in not engaged in any practice to bring them about. The atheist is content never to elevate consciousness beyond the ordinary. The antitheist, however, wants to control the consciousnesses of others, preventing them from experiencing any consciousness other than the ordinary. That is why an enlightened society can leave atheists and agnostics in peace, but cannot allow antitheists to succeed in their objective of eliminating higher consciousness from human existence.

Freemasonry is founded on two principles that are important to this discussion: a belief in a Supreme Being, and tolerance for the religious beliefs of others. While neither are necessary prerequisites for enlightenment, both together ensure that one’s own consciousness can elevate to a higher level, and that other people can do the same in their own way, under their own free will, subject to their own consciences.

Not every mason will agree with me, but I believe that one can assume higher levels of consciousness without recognizing the existence of the Great Architect of the Universe. Not all Buddhists are theists, and yet achieve very high meditative states. There is nothing in meditation as a spiritual practice that demands belief in a Supreme Being. In mathematics, the concept of quantity begins with three numbers: 0, 1 and ∞. None, one, and all. Nothing coalesces into something, the void materializes and thus becomes distinct or material. The one creates, or replicates, and then there are two, three, four, many, uncountably many, all.

In the cosmology of the Kabbalah, there is Ain (אין), or Nothing, which becomes Ain Sof (אין סוף), or No End, No Limit, and then becomes Ain Sof Or (אין סוף אור), or the Limitless Light. The Limitless Light coalesces into Adam Kadmon, the Manifest Absolute, which forms the Tree of Life, enters the Universe in Kether, and cascades down that structure until eventually creating our everyday world in Malkuth. Nothing becomes the One, which becomes the Myriad, which becomes All. Thus one in meditation can devote one’s attention on Nothing, on the One, or on All.

One of my rabbis remarked that “God is the ultimate atheist.” What he meant is that at the level of God, there is nothing higher. On our side of consciousness, we need to merge All into One before finding Nothing, but at the level of the One, there is no other. God only has non-existence when nothing else exists either. How do we merge All into One? By elevating our consciousness one step at a time.

What elevates consciousness? Prayer, meditation, fasting, trauma, ritual, a high fever, hyperventilation, entheogenic drugs, and dancing can do this, but are not guaranteed to. One person in a higher state of consciousness can bring others with him. A ritual can provide a structure for elevation, and if the principals of the ritual elevate themselves, they can bring the others with them. That is why most religions have group prayer. In the Jewish religion, when a Minyan, or ten men pray together (for egalitarians, ten people), they can generate more spiritual energy than one man can. The liturgy has certain prayers that can only be said when a Minyan is present. Similarly, one man cannot open a masonic lodge.

In C. S. Lewis’ book, The Great Divorce, Hell is described as a big city. A fairly bleary, dull place, everyone is unhappy, ranging from ennui to torment. None of them realize that they are in Hell. A bus route goes through the main street of the city, and buses regularly arrive and depart, taking passengers to Heaven. Anyone can get on the bus at any time, but most choose not to. Some wait for a bus, but at the last minute refuse to board, and others board very hesitantly.

Once on the bus, the passengers get more anxious and alarmed until the bus arrives at the outskirts of Heaven. Nearing Heaven, the passengers realize they are ghosts, and that Heaven is actually substantial. A single blade of grass can cause them great pain, and a single leaf is too heavy to lift. Blessed spirits from Heaven come forth to greet the ghosts, and encourage them to face the pain and ascend, but most of the ghosts refuse.

In the book, a blessed friend of the protagonist comes down to persuade him to remain. He explains that the period of time spent in the gray city was temporary, but only if he chooses to remain in Heaven. From the perspective of Heaven, Hell is miniscule and insignificant, insubstantial and irrelevant, but from the perspective of Hell, Heaven is awful and terrifying, far less comfortable than the soothing banality of Hell.

Using C. S. Lewis’ analogy, there is a bus that runs through Malkuth and takes us to higher realms, but we have to get on the bus. From the perspective of Malkuth, our earthly kingdom, other realms seem insane, irrelevant, irrational, dangerous, foolish, deluded, and wrong. But from a higher perspective, Malkuth itself fades in significance.

Using C. S. Lewis’ analogy, an agnostic either does not know about the bus, or knows about the bus and has formed no opinion about it. An atheist dismisses the bus as irrelevant to his life. An antitheist wants to destroy the bus, the road it drives on, and any traces of its existence.

As Fellows of the Craft, we are deeply devoted to science and reason. “Follow Reason” is the motto of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts. Reason and Doubt are allies, good allies, and we should approach the objects of our inquiry with healthy skepticism. But Denial is not Doubt, and Denial is the enemy of Reason. Those who assert that religious faith and scientific reason are mutually exclusive follow neither when they do so. We can find this assertion among the godly and the godless, but either way, the assertion is toxic.

Religion, Science and Philosophy are distinct mental disciplines, governed by faith, observation, and reason respectively, asking who, what, and why respectively. I pursue my religion by meditation and prayer, study of sacred texts, and communion with others in my faith. I pursue science by formulating hypotheses, conducting experiments, observing their outcomes, and refining my hypotheses in light of observed outcomes; conferring with others observing the same phenomena, amassing data until a cogent theory can be formulated that predicts the phenomena I observe. I pursue philosophy by asking really hard questions and using logic and reason to derive answers to these questions in a conscious manner. I need all three in my life. My mother is not a scientist. That doesn’t make her a bad person, but science has no appeal to her. My father is not religious. That doesn’t make him a bad person, but religion has no appeal to him. Not everyone is a philosopher, and that doesn’t make them bad people.

But denying another their religion, their science, or their philosophy is dangerous. If my religion demand that I murder children, as the ancient followers of Moloch did, we might have a problem. If my science involves performing vivisection on human beings, as Dr. Josef Mengele’s did, we might have a problem. If my philosophy tells me that other people are worthless animals, as the KKK does, we might have a problem. That is why Freemasonry demands tolerance and compassion of its brothers. We neither deny others their beliefs, nor allow others to deny others. Good religion abhors human sacrifice of its practitioners. Good science seeks to eliminate human suffering. Good philosophy advances the well-being of not only its adherents, but also those affected by the behavior of its adherents.

The Italian philosopher Noberto Bobbio warned us that politics obsesses about who when it should worry about how. Communists want to seize the means of production from the owning classes and deliver them to the working classes for their governance. Communists care about who is in power, but because they don’t worry about how they rule, they invite their adherents to commit atrocities. Nationalist movements are similar. What spared American Patriots from this kind of totalitarianism was a keen interest in how the British ruled America, and a firm resolution that how they would rule when they seized power would be just: under the rule of law, subject to the Bill of Rights.

Antitheists believe that faith is inherently evil, and must be eradicated from human consciousness. The only antitheists who were able to act upon this belief have been Communists, and they have an unbroken record of atrocity in pursuit of eliminating faith. The current crop of antitheists disavow Communism, but do not address how their eradication of faith will be any different from the Communist attempt. None that I have engaged with will address how they will achieve their goals.

Most religions have spread through mass violence. A nation invades another nation, and forces its faith on the conquered. In more enlightened times, religions have used reason and persuasion to spread their faith, some with substantial success. Similarly, the largest atheistic mass movements have been spread through mass violence. The People’s Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have spread atheism more powerfully than Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris and the like have done. That being said, the four authors I have mentioned have used reason and persuasion to spread their lack of faith, and have done so in an entirely peaceful way, and they are to be commended for not using violence to achieve their aims.

But the question remains: how will antitheists eliminate religion, faith, altered states of consciousness? How ethical will they be in the pursuit of their goal? Considering that reason is their rallying cry, it’s not unreasonable for us to ask. Contending that religious fanatics use violence to advance their ends does not absolve the antitheist. I oppose any, religious or atheist, who would seek to keep me from my own connection with the One. Where does Blasphemy Day lead? Are celebrants of Blasphemy Day going to mix pig’s milk into the creamers at Starbucks? Burn a Torah Scroll in my synagogue? Are they going to firebomb a church? Shave a Sikh’s head? What are the boundaries? If antitheists eliminate one tenet of human decency, how safe are the others?

Added on October 19, 2009

It has been pointed out to me that agnostics can be on a spiritual path. I agree.

Added on October 20, 2009

I think it’s crucially important to distinguish between the tolerant atheist and the intolerant antitheist. I can live peaceably with tolerant atheists.

Added on October 22, 2009

I think Fundamentalism or religious exclusivism in general contributes to this. Adherents of a particular sect are warned that if they reject even a single tenet of their sect’s practice that they are rejecting God by doing so. It’s no wonder that once a person questions some of the glaring flaws in such a sect’s theology, he is prone to reject religion in general as a result. It’s a naïve error, but no less naïve than the exclusivism that spawned it.

Agnostic literally means “without gnosis, or a direct experience of the Divine.” Positing my own dogma here, the only reason to believe in God, as far as I’m concerned, is either because of an experience of the Divine, or strong signs that such an experience is imminent. Every religion in its original inception guided the adherent, through prayer, ritual, meditation and other devotions, to such an experience. Only later did a hierarchy of rules and restrictions come up to interfere with such an experience. The atheist sees the interference but despairs of having a true religious experience, and ultimately regards religious experience as a hoax or delusion.

In my outreach to atheists, I really don’t care if they believe in God. I care that they are open to higher realms of consciousness, to a consciousness more encompassing than their ordinary waking state. If I can get a person to understand that the rambling interior monologue that is their constant companion is not the full extent of self, and if I can get them to seek what else other forms of consciousness have to offer, I have done enough. To most atheists, the obsequiousness of most religions is deeply repugnant and offensive to them. I prostrate myself before the One because while the One includes me, it is greater than me, beyond my tiny jurisdiction, encompassing all. To an atheist, that’s no different than groveling before an idol. We both despise idolatry, but to the atheist, there is nothing beyond idolatry. There is nothing beyond Malkuth.

If there are higher forms of consciousness, the logical question that follows is how high does consciousness go? What is the apex? But without an experience beyond ordinary consciousness, there’s no point in such a line of inquiry.