COPING WITH DESPAIR BY SUCCUMBING TO PRIDE AND MORAL SUPERIORITY
LIFE INSIDE THE FORTRESS OF ATHEISM was good. I thought I could make sense of the world just as well, or much better than the people who claimed to have 'faith.' I didn't believe in God, but I had a worldview that felt perfectly satisfactory. It wasn't a particularly cheery worldview, but I preferred truth over comfort any day.
What then did I believe?
In my worldview, I was the product of blind chance working over millions of years, a member of a species that happened to be more intelligent than other mammals but was not unique. I thought I was a good social creature because that was how humans evolved; the language I delighted in using was just a tool that humans had developed along the way. If I had been consistent, I would have embraced the fashionable theories of literary criticism that pronounced language itself to be self-contradictory and meaningless, but I didn't; one of the reasons I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the little regarded genre of fantasy was so that I could avoid that kind of literary theory and stick to a more traditional, meaning-based interpretation of the books. So even as I became more anti-Christian, and even though I was contradicting the principles that undergirded my atheism, I studiously avoided thinking my way through this.
I did not believe that human beings had souls. I thought that when I died, my consciousness would simply turn off, and that the only immortality in store for me was that of my body decaying and returning its component atoms for other living beings to use; sometimes I even thought that was a beautiful and consoling prospect. I vaguely thought of 'personhood' as defined by awareness and intelligence, though I sensed that this position, logically followed through, arrived at disturbing conclusions. If I thought abortion was acceptable, how was that so different from infanticide? If what made a 'person' was a functioning mind and body, were the lives of profoundly disabled people meaningful? Once the mind was gone, did a person have a right to live? What if the mind just didn't work well? I was aware that there was something wrong with this trajectory of thought, but I preferred not to think about it.
Behind all my consciously articulated view was the same premise: there is no God, no ultimate meaning beyond ourselves.
If that were true---if there is no real meaning to our lives---what is the point of living? As early as high school, I had recognized that problem. I remember in my junior-year Latin class reading some of the more philosophical despairing poets, and asking my teacher why, if they felt life was meaningless, didn't they just kill themselves? My teacher replied: A lot of them did.
Yet I felt life had to be worth living. I believed that it was possible and desirable to be a good person (never mind that question of where my standard of 'goodness' came from). I thought life was good. How could it be so and yet have no meaning?
Consistently lived out, atheism leads to despair.
What to do? When the alternative is succumbing to darkness, anything seems worth a try. In his poem 'Dover Beach,' Matthew Arnold confronts a world from which faith, and by extension, any hope or truth beyond himself, has withdrawn, and he cries out, 'Ah love, let us be true/To one another!' To a young would-be romantic, that sounds like a pretty good solution. But without the One who created us to be in relationship with Him, any two souls who try to cling to each other for all their meaning will drown just the same.
As for me, I tried to hold the darkness at bay by seeking meaningful activities that I deemed worthwhile: being a teacher, appreciating literature, winning fencing tournaments, writing a book, saving and investing money. These were things that were good, at least to an extent, in themselves, and there was no obvious down-side to looking for my life's meaning in them.
And yet, no matter what I turned my hand to, I found satisfaction in nothing. I wanted to be a good teacher, but felt my students just wouldn't co-operate. I wanted an immediate return on what I gave them---and they were so very needy. I became frustrated; I shirked my responsibilities to my colleagues; I resented misbehaving students. I recall one moment of terrible clarity. One day I found myself screaming, livid with anger, at a class of freshmen who would not, simply would not, stop talking in class. I felt suddenly horrified at the person I saw myself becoming, but felt powerless to stop it.
Fencing was a saving grace. Even when I was troubled in the rest of my life, fencing took me out of myself at least for a little while. There was something authentic about fencing: in the challenge of sport, there is no room for self-deception, and fencing was the one area of my life where I could acknowledge being something less than I wanted to be---and still feel like it mattered.
Increasingly, however, the view was clear: if life truly has no meaning, then our actions cannot themselves have any meaning either.
And so I came gradually to another way to manage despair: pride.
I began to lean on my sense of my own intellectual strength. 'All right' I said to myself, 'when we die, we die; nothing we can do has any ultimate meaning. So be it!' I could take pride in being able to face facts. Weak and sentimental people might scurry to the cover of some faith that allowed them to pretend to be otherwise, but I would be strong and resolute. I would look into the abyss, and let the abyss look back, and carry on.
In its own way, this was a very satisfying position. I could feel superior to anyone---certainly to Christians, whom I viewed as weak and unable to face the truth. I began to conceive of life as a great tragedy, our little conscious lives like tiny candle flames in the night, with despair constantly hovering in the flickering shadows. There is no meaning! I knew that was what my ideology had at its bedrock. Some fools couldn't face the darkness, but as for me, I savored the idea of standing on my lonely precipice, able to recognize my identity as a meaningless speck in an uncaring universe and carry on with the artificial comforts of religion.
----Holly Ordway, Not God's Type, a Rational Academic Finds A Radical Faith
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