Tuesday, April 01, 2008

God hath said in his heart: there is no fool

A very smart man once told me that God was necessary because without God there was no moral order to the universe. That without religion, more specifically, there was no basis on which to create or from which to derive a moral order.

Right-o, it's a fair cop. And it used to worry me some little. Having thrown out the baby Jesus with the holy bath water, I was faced with the dreary prospect of having to invent my own philosophy. Yerg. I'd rather just play my guitar.

And then, a few years ago, I decided that this wasn't a weakness or flaw in atheism, it was a virtue. Yes, we all have to decide what is right for ourselves.

And yes, this means that some of us--oh, why pretend: many of us!--will create systems that are self-serving at best, transient and inconsistent no doubt, and sometimes are downright wicked. That's what we'd do, all right. And have to live with the consequences, too.

And I realized: I don't really have a problem with that. I welcome it. That task, of creating Right and Wrong, of inventing Truth, is quintessentially human. Forget homo erectus and homo sapiens, forget even homo ludens. The anthropologists keep showing us we ain't all that special.
But one thing we clearly do that no other species does is seek Truth.

And (my last misuse of a postpositive conjunction for this post, I promise) check it out: this is exactly, is precisely, is totally what religion takes from us. We are not allowed to seek Truth; rather, it's delivered to us, like the mail. It's revealed to us, like a flasher in the park. Oh, we're encouraged to seek God, but we're either told it's ultimately impossible, or that it's ridiculously easy and all we need is to open our heart (not to be confused with open heart surgery). Either way, it is not an act of construction or creation. It's an act of reception, of submission.

Later for that. I can't think of one good or even not so good reason why my species should surrender its most vital and distinctive activity on the off-chance that there's some grouchy deity who might take offense if we stop paying attention to him in order to try to figure out ourselves. In the words of the sage: meh.

Smile on.