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consolatione · 7 years

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The atheist monk - A guide to religion for atheists

Imagine a medieval monk losing his faith. Would he find his life meaningless, or could he perhaps find just as much meaning in a life dedicated to God without faith? It’s an interesting question, because our secular societies may very well be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

In the God Delusion Richard Dawkins tells the story of how he shared an experience similar to that of one of his teachers, who was a priest. His teacher found himself overwhelmed by a heightened sense of awareness as he laid in the grass looking at the life surrounding him, and he felt in touch with the universe and everything. This experience led his teacher to Christianity, and Professor Dawkins to science.

I too, have had and continue to have similar experiences. Not just when I am in nature, but also when I see an old photograph or painting of someone who has passed away a long time ago, when I read old books and get to pry into the brain of an ancient philosopher, or, and this memory has stuck, when I in my early twenties visited the catacombs of Paris, and walked an hour among rows upon rows of human bones and skulls. Memento mori. Think about death. What we are, you will be. I was struck by the insight that every single skull was a remnant of a life – someone who had been born, who had lived, loved, and eventually died. A person who in her own mind was the centre of the universe. Who had a sense of who she was, and who dreamed. And what did she dream about? About money, love, children, adventure, achievments... It was like being in Dylan Thomas’ Under Milkwood, and I was Captain Cat hearing the voices of the dead. “Do you see me, Captain? The white bone talking? I'm Tom-Fred the donkeyman...we shared the same girl once… her name was Mrs Probert…”

To think that thought, to breath that air, to not shy away. That was a spiritual experience. I can also have that sensation when listening to a wonderful piece of music, visiting a beautiful place, reading literature, or enjoying art. It is transcending through beauty.

But to have these experiences you do not have to actually believe in a God. You may not think you are peering into a divine sphere of existence, but rather that you are simply the universe experiencing itself. To paraphrase Carl Sagan you are what happens when matter turns into consciousness.

I have seen it in many of the modern atheists, and I have also been guilty of the same thing, to reduce the experience of what it is to be human. Dawkins and many of the other leading atheists have talked about the spectacular and absolutely mind-boggling adventure it is to take part in science, and that organised religion even makes a mockery of how fantastic everything really is (I don’t agree with that particular detail, since the religious language and metaphors usually are more powerful). They tell us that religion cannot really do justice to the universe that unravels in front of us by the means of scientific exploration as we head into the future at a speed our forefathers hardly could have fathomed. And I stand on the sidelines applauding it. I love being swept away by the marvels that those great minds explain to me through their theories and discoveries. I love Carl Sagan, and how he could make it all sound so inspirational. So, it is a pity that many of the atheists who, like me, aren’t great scientists, reduce the experience of what it is to be a human. It is as if atheism and science is a package containing all the right answers, and you have those answers, because you adhere to that modern doctrine. You get to sit snuggly on a little box of truth, and smile condescendingly at all those who have yet to reach your elevated state of consciousness. The idea that there is a reasonable explanation for everything somehow means that we shouldn’t take in how brilliant it is to be alive. We are safe in our atheism. We are in the safest zone there is, because somehow we believe we have figured it all out. And Dawkins is our God... A notion I am sure he would be rather uncomfortable with.

It is either a very detached position, where we alienate ourselves from life, or a dogmatic position, resembling religious fervor. Maybe it’s a misplaced transference of the rational ideals of science. But regardless of the reasons, it undoubtedly makes a lot of people feel that atheism lacks something essential to describe their experiences. They would rather stick with religion, and pick the bits they like, and at the same time also believe in science. Because you can do that, you know? But for some reason the opposite is not possible within the atheist movement; you cannot be an atheist, but stick with the religious rituals or language.

When I step into a church I sometimes get the same feeling I experienced in the catacombs of Paris. The church room represents something profound and beautiful, which is why many people who don’t believe in God still want to get married in a church. The church has been part of our lives for a thousand years and more. It is our heritage. It is tradition. It has meaning.

In Sweden we still celebrate some pagan holidays, especially midsummer. There are quite a few traditions surrounding it as well, and most people partake in them with feelings of cultural belonging, rather than religious belonging. We dance around the phallic midsummer pole in honour of Freya, and young girls put seven flowers under their pillows to dream about their future husband. Atheists and Christians partake in these things without a second thought. But an atheist will not kneel in front of a priest and take part in communion. Why not? You could argue it still has religious meaning, and it would be disrespectful towards those who actually believe that it is the body of Christ. Still, just like dancing around the pagan pole, it is a tradition that belongs to our society and culture too, and its meaning may be different for an atheist than for a Christian, but it still has meaning.

It also begs the question how many traditions we can get rid of without losing something of our culture and a sense of who we are. The communion may be the extreme example, since it is the affirmation that you believe in a living Christ, but what about all the other traditions? How many of them can we get rid of without filling them with something else? Are we to fill them with consumerism? Are we to make up new ones and lose a link that connects us to the past? Or can we uphold them, even though we don’t necessarily believe in God, beyond perhaps God as a metaphor?

Looking once more at the ancient Scandinavian society it strikes me that the equivalent of the word religion in the ancient norse language is ‘siðr’, meaning custom or tradition. Regardless of how the ancient Nordic people related to that word and its connotations, I argue that the practice of a religious tradition is possible for an atheist. Many old customs have survived, though their meanings may have changed.

We cannot escape death

But if I do not believe in God, why should I practice religious traditions? This is a fair question and the natural answer is of course that it’s up to each and everyone. I believe there are good reasons for doing so, not the least for the fact that Modernity has lost so many traditions in favour of what seems to be trivial pursuits of technology, commerce and online communication. As satisfying they may seem for our immediate needs and wants, they do not comfort us in the realisation that we are mortal, and they are a poor consolation when we face tragedy and hardships.

My fiancée is a jewellery artist, and she once made a collection of mourning jewellery inspired by the Victorian tradition of wearing special jewellery to show that you were grieving. Her work was based around ideas that we need rituals and symbols to handle death. We need things to matter. She asked the question how we handle grief in a secular society. Can there be a symbol that you wear to show that you are mourning, that goes beyond the religious symbols? At that time we also travelled to Rome on vacation, and took the opportunity to meet the Sisters of Saint Bridget of Sweden. We sat down with one of the nuns talking about life, sorrow, death, faith, the church and secular society. She was very open-minded, friendly, and accepting of us, even if we did not share her faith. I remember that she said that there are so many things that haunt young people today, they are always in pursuit of something, but they don’t know why. Her answer, of course, was a life with God and the Catholic church. We, however, were looking for a different answer. Or maybe it’s the same answer, except without her strong faith. I need peace and quiet, and contemplation just as much as her. When someone who I love dies I need comfort, and a way to express my grief. We left that wise sister with a sense of understanding that the Catholic rituals and the liturgy were meaningful, regardless of your level of faith.

A few years later a friend of mine died of cancer. She was one of those people I hadn’t seen in years, but still thought about from time to time. We were never close, but I did feel a need to say goodbye. Since she was an atheist she had asked for a secular service, and as it turned out, the father of an old friend of mine held the service on behalf of the Swedish Humanist society. He said some really nice things about death, and how we should commemorate her - that a part of her remains here in life since we remember her. But even so, even though I felt that what he said had meaning, it was clear that the Humanists are lacking in the liturgy department. Not that Christian funerals always are better in every sense. At my grandmother’s funeral, for example, the priest talked endlessly about hell, and that it was good that my grandmother was so religious (which I doubt that she was), because now she could go to God instead. But although he was horrible, at least he had a church. He had the robes. He had a thick book to read from. He had psalms to sing. He had the bells chiming to show the world that we mourn that a life that was precious to us is no more.

Meaning of words and stories

The Swedish renaissance historian Olaus Petri (1493-1552) described the ancient Scandinavian religion in terms that would go well with modern religious theologians. He claimed that the trolls and giants of ancient mythology weren’t meant to be taken literally. They did indeed describe actual events, but not of Gods, giants and trolls, but instead they were mythological metaphrases of events where tyrants were killed by actual people. In other words people who had done great deeds were immortalized and celebrated through sagas. The same thing was proposed by the greatest source of information about nordic paganism, Snorre Sturlasson (1179-1241), who claimed that Odin was an actual person who was made into a God. Looking at these stories in this way they become allegories and stories connected to the human experience, not actual facts. Practical and non-fundementalist approaches to religion has been used throughout history. The romans for example were quite liberal in translating Gods back and forth in their Interpretatio Romana, where they believed that other tribes simply had different names for the same Gods. Thor and Mars were the same God, just as Greek and Roman Gods were the same. Romans also, famously, made actual people into Gods as Emperors were considered Gods. But many of their philosophers argued that anyone could become a god, or at least godlike, simply by being the right type of person. This is not even just a pagan view, Boëthius argues (if I am allowed some simplification) in his Consolatione philosophiae that a happy person is a God, because God is happiness. This also echoes the ideals of Epicurus and numerous other philosophers of the Ancient world.

The idea that a word is an absolute truth and has an exact meaning is something that the secular scientific community has in common with religious fanatics, and an explanation to why they have such a hard time understanding ancient people and religions. For atheists it is often baffling how people can believe what they say they believe, not grasping that they are talking about something different than an alternative to the scientific explanations. It is more of an inner world, than a factual world. And many religious people have themselves not understood that their need for a stronger symbolic language in their lives shouldn’t be mixed with the realities as described by science, that it is simply a question of having different domains.

Reducing the human experience

Rituals and symbols are important parts of what it is to be a human. It’s how we on our own, and together, can celebrate the things that are important to us. And the things that are important to religious people are also important to atheists. Birth, marriage, coming of age, midlife, death. And since I live in Sweden, where there are dark winters and light summers, we also care about seasons. We want to light candles and gather our families and friends around us during the darkest period of the year, we want to celebrate the returning of the light in spring, the lingering light of summer, and the turn to autumn.

I love celebrating Midsummer. There are few remaining religious connotations about it, but there are still a lot of rituals, and traditions. They may not mean much for most today in a religious sense, but I wouldn’t go as far as saying that they are meaningless. Still, how much can you reduce something before it loses its purpose? Do we actually want to reduce meaning in our lives at all, don’t we want more meaning? If anything we should fill them with meaning.

When I look around me in society I feel that we have lost touch with a lot of things that are important. I am pretty sure that very few people will think about their iPhones on their death beds. We seem to care a lot about things that are really not that important at all. Working in advertising I find that my own words have lost meaning. My words. Everything is packaged into time slots, into trends, into lines. We buy lifestyles, and people are hyper sensitive to trends. We look for meaning, but it’s all on the surface. It’s something you can buy. If you want to go deeper, you are left with the spirituality of religion. Or nothing at all.

Look around you, and you will see how modern people are trying to be profound in a society where consumerism and efficiency are the holiest concepts. It comes down to what scarves you wear, flaunting your connection to whatever subculture you have come to understand has meaning, is profound. But it is empty and shallow, and I think most of us understand that something important is missing. Modern society leaves me quite bored for the most part, and I think it comes down to what Marcus Aurelius talks about in his Meditations; that we shape the world through our minds. If we lose the purpose, we lose the meaning. As we are desperately trying to invent purposes that are separated from what truly matters. We live in a world governed by principles that are dictated by economy, politics and rationality, but we have lost sight of things that matter to us; family, friends, community, beauty and contemplation. “Arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” (Meditations).

Modern society, and modernism, is an expression of this soullessness that has gripped the Western world. It reduces us to consumers and producers. It fills voids with commercials and the need to gratify our needs immediately. There is fast food, fast sex, fast work, fast cars. We even invent how to be still, trying to find meaning going to meditation camps, yoga or whatever other trendy things that are on offer. In the pursuit of instant gratification it seems that many of us don’t have time to take in what it is to be alive, or to value what is really important to us. I believe it is damaging to us as a species and as individuals.

A friend told me that when the Strasbourg cathedral was built there were only 20,000 inhabitants of that city. Such an impressive building that still stands. Today we can build taller buildings by far. But most of them will feel outdated and will probably need structural repairs within 20 years. I find this image striking when comparing two societies, and I can’t escape the feeling that a society that builds to last, is a society where humans feel more at home. If we disconnect ourselves too much from our history, we will lose track of ourselves and the things that have been important to us for thousands of years.

Religious practice has been a pause in the everyday strife, and as we are getting rid of it we are also getting rid of the pauses. Of the time to reflect. Of the time to enjoy.

The atheist monk I imagine that through the ages there have been quite a few atheist monks. Men who have turned to a life of introspection and religion in times of literal belief, only to find that they did not believe in God. It has most likely been an insight they kept to themselves as they lived out their days in a monastery, following the same routines as their brothers. I imagine that quite a few of them still felt that the cloister life had meaning after they defected from their faith. I can certainly see the positive aspects of living a simple life together with others, forsaking materialism for a kitchen garden, reading, singing and whatever they do in a monastery. I am sure that even an atheist monk can find solace in singing religious hymns, and taking part in mass. I am sure many of those atheist monks did not regret their choice. In fact, some may have been atheists before, and still sought out the monastic life.

#religion #faith #atheism #secular

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