And I did take another class with Dr. Gonzales: The next in his series was called From Paganism to Christianity, which surveyed pre-Christian religions of the European and para-European world, some with which I was quite familiar (like Norse), and others that I had never even heard of (like Mithraism).
Despite being incidental, the assaults against Christianity were many and vicious. I know they weren’t intentional because much later, after the course was over, Dr. Gonzales would disclose to me during his office hours that he himself was Christian (Baptist, even?). The realization shocked me because his class was the final nail in the coffin for what was left of my Christianity, and for organized religion at large, for that matter.
I hadn’t been particularly moved by the delightful stories of Classical Mythology, as we discussed them somewhat superficially and with frivolity. For example, we had learned that Dionysus was the god of wine and partying, an instant fan favorite among us college undergraduates, we being obsessed with beer and titties and whatnot. However, in From Paganism to Christianity we delved deeper, learning that Dionysus was born of a virgin on December 25th. In fact, we learned that other gods were born on the winter solstice as well, like Egyptian Osiris and Persian Mithras, the connection apparently being that this was the most important day of the year to many ancient peoples, as it signaled the coming of longer, warmer days and the growing of crops. As I now hear many a pagan declare these days, it turns out that “the reason for the season” may not be the birth of Jesus per se, but the optimism of turning the corner from winter to spring, and hence, more abundant food and better health for all.
We learned about myriad other parallels between the ancient gods and Christianity, each being a backhand slap to the face because I had always assumed that Christianity was unique and original. Naturally, there’s controversy and it kinda depends on whom you ask, but yes: The manger, the virgin birth, the disciples, the miracles, the temptation, the last supper, the betrayal, the resurrection, the ascension, et cetera—it’s arguably all been done before. As we proceeded through From Paganism to Christianity, it became increasingly doubtful that Christianity is original at all. Even those non-ridiculous parts of the Bible that I had continued to cherish, like the Golden Rule, are covered elsewhere, including Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, and yes, even Islam.
Perhaps a reason Christianity has endured and become so popular is because it is a relatively new version of the same age-old myth, founded in a bit of a chronological sweet spot. The relatively modern minds who wrote it borrowed some things from older religions that had staying power but they were smart enough to whittle away much of the absurdity that had doomed some of those more ancient religions. However, the context in which Christianity was pitched was not so modern that it could be subjected to uninhibited and widespread criticism (as an even newer religion would be, for example, if it was presented today). Perhaps a perfect storm of time and context allowed it to gain a particular momentum that would take centuries to undo—at least for modern society; it came undone for me personally during the course of that class. Once the seal was broken and I became able to critique Christianity without fearing for my soul, it became glaring that it was expiring as well, with its endorsement of slavery and the oppression of women and homosexuals and so on.
Even before From Paganism to Christianity, college had been teaching me something else, that every individual and every culture is centric: Everyone believes that he, and his time, are it, the one that matters the most. Humans are narcissistic by nature, and so necessarily are, too, the cultures they comprise. Individuals (and societies) feel more in touch with reality than the people who lived before them or who currently live on the other side of the river. But their narcissism doesn’t allow them to contemplate how the people on the other side of the river are thinking the same way about them, or how the people of the future will look back at them with pity. They believe, or know, that their beliefs are correct.
Ironically, I found that studying the history of religion was one of the best catalysts to help me step outside the centrism and narcissism, to see how childish it is to be so self-assured about something that can’t really be defended. It became easy to imagine how that I might have an alter-ego over in Iran, a Muslim college student who is 110% sure that his religion is right and that mine is wrong—just as I have felt up to this point about his. How incredibly self-centered of us. We’re both equally wrong, because our respective beliefs are not based on reality; they are based on what we have been told, different myths endorsed by our respective cultures.
As I started to appreciate the fiction of it all, it was hard for me to imagine my classmates—many of whom I assumed were Christian—not having similar experiences. I would sometimes look around that gigantic auditorium, looking for a sign on anyone’s face, but there was nothing out of the ordinary there. Just some traditional looks of engagement, a few smiles, some sleepy faces, and a lot of pretty girls. No one seemed as aghast as I felt. Me, I was forced to finally admit that I had not only been wrong about the Bible, but was also wrong about God and Jesus, even my very liberal, ill-defined versions of them.
But once again, the realization was not a catastrophe. As the dust settled from this disturbance, I realized I was simply still maturing, that I would have to continue to adjust and adopt the next label, this time agnostic theist, one who believes in a god of some sort but is unsure of his nature. I will even continue to pray, but I’ll have to address “god” instead of “God” when I do.
Instead of conceptualizing the different religions of the world as mutually exclusive—and therefore all false—we can focus on the other side of the coin, that they are actually all congruent. God is too great to be understood by feeble human minds. Different cultures necessarily have different conceptualizations of him because each has been forced to attempt to describe him through the eyes of his own times and peers. Osiris is actually Mithras is actually Zoroaster is actually Jesus. We’ve been worshipping the same god all along.
And what a crying shame that so much war and destruction have been born of religious conflict when we haven’t even been in disagreement. I guess that’s human nature; I have to understand that. Not forgive it, but understand it. Egocentrism, ethnocentrism. But I’m gonna be a bigger and better person and see through all that crap. “Spiritual but not religious,” that’s what I am.
A few semesters after From Paganism to Christianity, in 1993, my paternal grandfather died of natural causes. He was old, like most of the Landers when they succumb. I didn’t know him well, and probably hadn’t spent more than a hundred hours with him total, if that. But he always seemed like a sweet guy; I have no recollection of him being mean or even abrasive. He was tallish and thin and sometimes smoked a pipe. Like lots of kids, I was captivated by that smell. I kinda revered him, as children often do adults who are calm and not oppressive.
Besides his pipe, I have a couple of fond and poignant memories of “Papaw.” Once, during some holiday (I think Christmas), he, my brother, and I had what we would later refer to as a “farting contest.” It wasn’t planned, but totally spontaneous, one of those moments in which the planets were simply aligned just right, with three boys left alone, each a little gassy. I can still remember laughing uncontrollably, and watching Papaw lose it as well. We connected that day, at least a little.
I also remember when Papaw’s memory started to slip. His was the relatively kind type, in that he never seemed distressed about it. I recall another special occasion, definitely Thanksgiving this time, when we were all crowded around the TV watching the Cowboys game with him. Papaw was a little disoriented and would lose sight of which game we were watching: During those moments in which the network would show a highlight from the Lions game earlier, he’d jump up and shout, thinking it was still the Cowboys (hey, our colors are similar!). When we corrected him, gently, he laughed and didn’t seem embarrassed.
When he died, I took a little time off from school and drove up to Bronte or Winte
rs or whatever tiny, dilapidated West Texas town that was for the funeral. We call that area “west” despite how central it is on a map. It is quite west-ish, if you consider the population density of the state, which is concentrated towards the east. In any event, I had to borrow my ex-girlfriend’s car, because mine was old and feeble and I just didn’t want to get stranded out there in that desolation.
The funeral was much more tidy than I felt one should be, but I’m not sure why I anticipated otherwise. There were only like eight of us, my little family of four and my dad’s brother’s equally small family. I can’t recall if it was at a church or a funeral home; the two may have been the same out there. It could’ve been a school for that matter—the place didn’t have any spirituality whatsoever. I don’t remember seeing a casket. Maybe he was cremated.
Since I had spent so little time with my grandfather we weren’t really attached in a meaningful way, beyond his pipe and farting and peaceful senility. So, I just kinda went along for the ride, trying to look sadder than I felt and just watched the others. It was very intimate: The eight of us, plus the minister, were sitting in a circle on some of those cheap folding chairs you might find at a small-town convention center. My dad and uncle were having uncannily similar experiences to one another, which were quite intense and therefore antithetical to mine. It was a little unsettling, bordering on frightening, one of those moments when you’re really alive—there’s no bullshit; real, profound stuff is going down. As the minister was talking—and it was a very Bible-laden service—my dad and uncle both had their eyes closed and appeared to be in deep, passionate thought. Every time the minister would say something about Papaw not being gone but instead being with the Lord, and all of us being reunited with him later, they would say, “Amen! Praise his name! Yes, Lord!” and stuff like that. But neither of them looked happy; this shit wasn’t Sunday school. They both looked so incredibly serious when they spoke, yet oddly comfortable at the same time, as if they had done this many times before. I’ll never forget that scene, how they were both doing the same incredible thing, whatever it was.
About three quarters of the way through the minister’s spiel, my feelings of awkwardness suddenly transformed to clarity. I was hit so hard by the freight train of epiphany that I was seriously concerned that the others must be able to tell by the look on my face: This ceremony is not for Papaw.
This ceremony is for my dad and his brother, the two who have been hurt the most by this inconceivable event, that is, the loss of their father. Sitting there in that little room with my little family, it suddenly became so perfectly clear why we even believe in Heaven and have ceremonies like this to assert its existence. It’s not that different religions are different cultural mechanisms to access the same universal truth; it’s that they’re all different cultural fantasies to soothe the same universal fear.
It’s literally unbearable when our loved ones die.
But somehow we keep existing. We miss our loved one, but we’re probably—on some level—at least equally concerned about our own impending demise. Typically, we can’t even really conceive of our own demise, but it becomes as tangible as ever, sitting in the room with the corpse (or ashes) of what used to be the Most Powerful Being in our lives. That god who used to feed us, keep us warm, and save us from every conceivable disaster, is gone. We’re as close as ever to death, but we still can’t fathom the notion completely.
So we don’t. We refuse to even try. Instead, we choose to believe it’s not happening at all, and that it’s not going to happen to us, either.
Sitting there, among all the “Amens” and angels, it all came together—Candide, Descartes, the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum, Dionysus, and now my dead grandfather—and pushed me over a line so that I snapped and became an atheist. It was all so sudden and striking that I didn’t even have a chance to indulge agnosticism, that is, the position that one is simply unsure whether there is a god. No, I was too compelled for that. All religions, all bibles, all gods, all religious ceremonies, all conceptions of heaven —and any hopes about any of these being valid or real—have simply been hoaxes, ways to turn this particular unbearable situation into a bearable one.
Driving back home to Austin afterwards, I reminisced about the first funeral I had ever attended, that for my mother’s father (the fireman) back in 1989, when I was still enthusiastically regarding myself as Christian. That man had always been an atheist, something that we never really talked about openly, as if he had been a child molester or something. But when he died there was chatter that he must have “found the Lord” right towards the end. People were citing things he had said or done over the last months or years of his life to support their optimism. I remembered having embraced those comforting thoughts myself back then as well. But now, driving home as a born-again atheist, I could only feel cynical. I mocked the notion that had comforted me before, asking myself, sarcastically, “Did anyone ever go to hell?” Not in my family, apparently. I kinda felt like a fool for ever buying into any of this religion crap, and so now it was time to be a dick about it.
Well, just as the dust had settled after realizing Christianity couldn’t possibly be the only spiritual truth, the dust would settle after converting to atheism. I still hadn’t given up on transcendence entirely! I just had to loosen up even a little more. Now I would appeal to the most ambiguous conception of immortality possible, not of a soul per se wandering around in heaven but that of my “consciousness”—somehow involving a god-free Energy that Binds Us and quantum physics and other things that will never be fully understood. Since education and rationality had made it impossible to have faith in anything describable, I would just have to subscribe to something that couldn’t be put into words. As ambiguous as the notion was, it helped make sense of some loose ends, like that tidbit from the near-death-experience chapter of The Three-Pound Universe, the tidbit that I’d been trying to ignore up to that point:
Even more remarkably, dyed-in-the-wool atheists were just as likely to have NDEs as born-again Christians—although the pious more often communed with a biblical God, the nonbelievers with a “warm presence” or a holy light.6
Of course: If we atheists can have near-death experiences then eternal life must have nothing to do with any god or religion. It obviously has more to do with science—wonderfully non-exclusive, all-forgiving science. I’ll continue to call myself “spiritual but not religious,” only now the “spiritual” will refer to the belief that quantum physics (or something) is in charge of it all.
All of these developments were validated by Omni magazine articles and well-made documentaries featuring celebrity intellectuals like Deepak Chopra. They spoke with authority, charisma, and a glow that made it clear that we new-age spiritualists finally had it all figured out, that science and spirituality are the same, and no one will be left out. Now that’s really beautiful: a universe where everyone is granted eternal life. And again, what a shame that the rest of humanity can’t see these truths, but instead continue to kill each other because they’re too immersed in their respective myths.
Why is religion so ubiquitous? Granted, I’m not a real religious scholar, but I’m personally unaware of any significant society throughout history that has been primarily atheistic. The ubiquity (or near ubiquity; I hate to say “never”) of religion suggests it must have a role in satisfying fundamental human needs.
Over two millennia ago, the amazingly open-minded-before-his-time Lucretius identified one of the most likely reasons religion has always had such appeal:
For, in good sooth [truth], it is thus that fear restraineth all mortals,
Since both in earth and sky they see that many things happen
Whereof they cannot by any known law determine the causes;
So their occurrence they ascribe to supernatural power.7
Today, I still find myself truly in awe—even a little scared sometimes—when I’m beholding a Texas summer thunderhead approaching. And I’ve got the luxury of weath
er.com to find out how dangerous it actually is (or not), including a “map in motion” to see exactly where it is and when it will arrive, if at all. Nevertheless, I’m still a little scared, and very much in awe.
Imagine how a dark, gigantic cumulonimbus cloud with lightning and thunder must have appeared to the people of Lucretius’s time—how could they not posit an angry god behind it! They weren’t stupid; it’s actually fairly rational, given what they did know at the time. Again, they had to have an explanation—not explaining it was not an option. Kudos, Lucretius, for already doubting it all, decades before Christ was even born.
In a book that is as engaging as its title, Existential Psychotherapy, the venerable psychiatrist Irvin Yalom elaborates:
Human beings have always abhorred uncertainty and have sought through the ages to order the universe by providing explanations, primarily religious or scientific. The explanation of a phenomenon is the first step toward control of that phenomenon.8
He provides a coherent example, of
natives [who] live in terror of the unpredictable eruptions of a nearby volcano … their first step toward mastery of their situation is explanation. They may, for example, explain the volcano’s eruption as the behavior of a displeased volcano god … [as a result,] a course of action is available that augments their sense of mastery: if the volcano explodes because the god is displeased, then there must be methods of placating and eventually controlling the god.
Absolutely. One way to treat fear of the unknown is to know it—even if you have to trick yourself into thinking you know it!
Again, one doesn’t need a volcano nearby to benefit from the salve afforded by gods and creators. Even the Garden of Eden or modern Toronto will conjure the uneasy feelings Ernest Becker discussed, “the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum of each single thing, of the fact that there are things at all.” And for those throughout history who have not been so inquisitive to be haunted by the mysterium, other phenomena of the average person’s life would have demanded contemplation otherwise. British biologist Lewis Wolpert, from his Six Impossible Things before Breakfast:
Optimistic Nihilism Page 12