Reilly responded to my biography yesterday, when I think he meant to respond to my post regarding the handsome and outspoken atheists of our day, as well as the broad question of a lifestyle outside of Religion, Magic, Spiritualism, and the Pantheon. What follows is his response:
I don’t think one need be an atheist to think, ‘what do we do.’ or that thinking that would make one an atheist (though the hardcores like the late J-bone Falwell would disagree)
I believe in a god (the big-bang must have started from something) but that even so meaning, in any sense, is still subjective and not predetermined. When you say that people living under these assumptions are ‘waiting for answers’ I think it is extremely well put, especially since ‘having’ the answer, mystical and hypothetical as it sounds, implies conclusion, or completion. I can’t imagine that anyone both has the answer, and is engaged in the act of living with it, so that the question ‘what do we do’ answers itself, we do what we do.
*
I think that what you said about ‘waiting for answers’ was well said, and I agree, or at least find it unlikely, that all of our questions will inevitably be answered. Such a Borgesian world would surely be fantastic, after a fact, but perhaps a bit dull, when put under the magnifying lens. I think that you’re right- the enlightened person should do what one does. But I don’t think it is necessarily as simple, nor do I plan to offer a dictum regarding how an atheist or anyone else, should live their life.
This blog inevitably concerns itself with ritual, and that was what I was speaking of when I paraphrased the few conversations I’ve been in. For instance: I reject marriage before God, or I reject the notion of a Jesus-Christmas, or I reject the ideas of commemorating the loss of my dead before God. But as an atheist, I still seek the means to marry, to give gifts to my family, and to commemorate the loss of my dead.
So what do I do? Well it is time that we accept that before the current concept of a Judeo-Christian god, or Aquinas’ “Immovable Mover” proof of god of which you cite, there was marriage, there were gifts, and there was death. I seek to encourage an expansion of rational debate between people and the rituals they share. Perhaps I was being simple when asking “What do we do?” What I meant was how do we practice meaningful rituals when we have no doctrine?
I hope this addresses some of your ideas, and I thank you for your response. On Monday I hope I can allay some of these reservations. I plan to talk bluntly about circumcision (male and female genital mutilation)- a bit about where the ritual originates, a bit about the secular argument for circumcision, and a bit about why we should or shouldn’t do it, and why we should definitely not just do it cause everybody does.
Get RR In An Email
2 Comments
May 19, 2007 at 4:55 pm
just a minor comment that I want to address….
I keep seeing things along the line of “the big-bang must have started from something”. People are so ready to believe that God “always existed” so why is it such a far stretch to believe that the “entity that blew up” becoming the Big Bang didn’t always exist? Why did something have to create it? We think time is linear but I believe it’s more cyclical. The entity will reform and regather to once again “Big Bang” and, dare I say, create again.
May 19, 2007 at 7:11 pm
Well, and according to certain astronomers and physicists, there is a theory (or speculation?) that the universe expands and contracts, that it is currently expanding, that it will later contract into a single atom, or something of the sort, essentially becoming excessively simple once more (I’m thinking of Kurzweil, here, and Hawking). But Sagan does refute (or at least challenge) the idea that before time itself there was God, the immoveable mover. The question that he asks then is who (or what) created God? And who created that creator, and so on. I think this a sufficient polemic in the “What came first?” argument.