Who is this God Person, Anyway?

I recently had a conversation/debate with someone who said he believed strongly in God. Not the Catholic God, not Allah (he's a lapsed Catholic) but his own, personal concept of a god that he was sure explained the creation of the universe better than any natural process possibly could. Due to the late hour and too much alcohol the conversation eventually went off topic and finally degenerated into broad merriment, but the subject of the conversation has been on my mind and is something I've been thinking about, which lead me to the question - what do people mean when they talk about "God"?

(Of course, this is a topic that deserves much more time and energy than I'm giving it here, but these are just some quick thoughts I'm putting down as a distraction from work, so bear with me.)

When people say they believe in God, generally there is a very specific God they're referring to, one who often appeared first in a holy book, or who is the central figure of a major organized religion. But occasionally you hear people refer to personal, new age, generic version of "God" they believe in. It's not the God of the Bible or Koran or the gods of the Bhagavad Gita, of course, because religion is just a cultural construct and God exists beyond any sort of man-made organization or human thought. Et cetera.

But here's the thing that people need to keep in mind, whether they think a god exists or not: God is a cultural construct. He does not exist outside of nature, or as part of nature - God "exists"  as much as he is a character in a book (or several books), and the "God" that people either do or don't believe in today can only be a specific God whose characteristics and history were written down and created by a particular culture as a product of a particular time and place. For a person to say she believes in a God that transcends all of this is to say she believes in a God as artificial and created as the gods of those ancient peoples she so correctly rejects. The only difference is that, in this case, she's the one doing the creating. A god produced from one individual's mind does not make that god any more real than Yahweh and his associates/rivals.

If you want evidence of the existence of a god, you have to find that evidence outside of your own head. Logic and arguments (ie, language) will never be sufficient, anymore than Darwin's Origin of Species on its own was sufficient to make the case for evolution - the evidence for evolution is out there, in the real world, inviting skeptics and the curious alike to go observe it for themselves. You'll find no such equivalent when it comes to God.

The nature of God is not understood in any universal way, even by believers in gods like those with the bestselling holy books. That in itself should raise eyebrows - if there's not universal agreement on the nature of God, then either one religion is right and the rest are wrong, or they're all wrong. But God, being a cultural artifact, of course, doesn't actually exist, s impossible for any one person to actually know. If they claim to, they're making it up.

(Title of this post taken from a book title referred to in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Life, the universe, and atheism

I met my friend J. for a pint last night, and at one point he asked me how central to my identity atheism is. It's a good question, and one I didn't have a ready answer for. I was raised Catholic, and stopped practicing more than 10 years ago, but didn't really think of myself as an atheist until the past few years. J. was raised more or less without religion, so I did say that, basically, having been raised with religion, atheism is a bigger deal to me than it is to him. He agreed with this, and the conversation then moved on to other things. But the question has been on my mind, so I thought it might be worth blog post to look at how central being an atheist is to my identity.

I became an atheist over time - there was no eureka moment of sudden clarity. It had been years since I stopped believing in God or going to church (except with family on holidays) when I started considering myself an atheist. Looking back, I'd say there were a few things that converged in a relatively brief period of time, like starting to read science books, the appearance of the New Atheists, the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and, not long after, the build up to and birth of my own daughter. These are all things that combined to force me to think about what it is I really believe and know, and why.

Reading more science books filled in enormous gaps in my knowledge of nature and the universe, and that really didn't leave much for God to do in the universe, as far as I can see. But it was the birth of my daughter that really focused my thinking about religion. My wife is Jewish, and with overall a positive experience of being raised Catholic (though not practicing for several years), I tried to find ways to keep Catholicism as a part of my cultural identity. Being Jewish is an advantage here in that Jews can be atheists and still be Jewish. As Paul Giamatti said, "there are no better atheists in the world than the Jews".

Before conceiving, and during the pregnancy, we had several conversations about how to raise our child, and while trying to decide whether or not to baptize her (before I knew it was a her) I came to the conclusion that there is absolutely no way to have a cultural baptism that is not also an expression of religious belief. I realized that I want to be honest with my daughter about the world, I want to be able to justify my decisions regarding both her life and my own, and it is easier to justify to myself and to her not having her baptized than making her a member of an organization with whose raison d'être I fundamentally disagree. So, in that way, in the sense that atheism colours and informs real life decisions that I make, I do have to say that atheism is a big part of my life and, probably, a big part of my sense of identity.

Of course, being an atheist is just a starting point - recognizing that God does not exist is essentially a matter of overcoming an inhereted cultural belief, but it's no more a statement about the universe itself than (to bring Richard Dawkins into it) recognizing that goblins and fairies don't exist. So while atheism, and my opinions on religion and science and all that, are a big part of my life, they don't exactly come up in conversation everyday. I think that's one important distinction to explain - calling yourself an atheist only tells people what you don't believe, and it says very little about what you actually do believe, or like, or enjoy doing in your free time.

To sum up, because being an atheist is something I'd say I've accomplished, through reading, thinking, and looking at the world, and being convinced of a godless universe after a religious upbringing (I'd say I'm symapthetic to Douglas Adams' "radical atheist" position) it's a small, personal intellectual accomplishment that I can even say I'm proud of.

Hitchens

"When he was admitted to the hospital for the last time, we thought it would be for a brief stay. He thought — we all thought — he’d have the chance to write the longer book that was forming in his mind. His intellectual curiosity was sparked by genomics and the cutting-edge proton radiation treatments he underwent, and he was encouraged by the prospect that his case could contribute to future medical breakthroughs. He told an editor friend waiting for an article, “Sorry for the delay, I’ll be back home soon.” He told me he couldn’t wait to catch up on all the movies he had missed and to see the King Tut exhibition in Houston, our temporary residence.

The end was unexpected"

These words are from Carol Blue, Christopher Hitchens' wife, which she wrote in the afterword to his final book, Mortality. The paragraph amazes me because it shows a desire to continue living in the face of an inevitable death. Not a desire as in the wish to deny death, or a tearful grasping on in the hopes death will suddenly change its mind and leave you alone, but a desire to squeeze the most out of the last few days of life knowing that the end is soon. 

It's difficult for me to read this without relating it to my own life. Unlike Christopher Hitchens I don't have the knowledge (advantage?) of knowing when I'll die, even approximately. So what prevents me from living my remaining decades with as much curiosity and energy (mental if not physical) as he intended to live his last days? Is it the ambiguity of the end that holds me back? I wonder if it's similar to having a new roll of toilet paper - when you first use it, you're not afraid to use a few extra squares to wipe your ass, but as it nears the end of the roll the possibility of being caught without suddenly becomes more real, and you start conserving, even preparing a new roll before it runs out. 

So, to sum up, maybe life is just one big roll of toilet paper. 

I could use Carol Blue's words about her husband's vitality in the face of death as a call to arms to carpe my own diem and all that, but it's too clichéd and ridiculous and besides, it's not going to happen. But hopefully thinking about the death of someone like Hitchens will do me some good by at least reminding me that death is inevitable, if not tomorrow, and that, as Hitchens also once wrote, "the grave will supply plenty of time for silence."

I originally wrote this back in August 2011, but it still seems pertinent, if unorganized and un-edited:

I just had a thought. I was thinking about how the City of Toronto is currently privatizing some services, and I wondered if the workers for those companies were to interact on some work assignment with city workers, who are presumably better paid and with better benefits, would there likely be some resentment? Sure there would, which is natural. So why wouldn't they just go to their employer and demand the same pay and benefits city workers are getting? Because the employer would just tell them - there are plenty of people out of work in this city who'd be happy to have your job at your current level of pay. And I bet the guys working for the private company know this if they haven't been explicitly told to be grateful for their jobs. And continuing this thought, I'm realizing just how much businesses are benefiting, long-term, from the current economic situation. The longer the unemployment rate stays high, the more reluctant workers will be to fight for better conditions, the less popular support there will be for unions, and the cheaper labour in general will become. Once the economy does pick up and the unemployment rate goes down, wages will be lower than they were before the recession or whatever began, and it will take years for workers to make up those losses. And keeping in mind a lot of the unemployed workers have been laid off from governments cutting back on the public service, whose former jobs will no longer be available, the problem of low wages and poor conditions will be exacerbated even further by no longer having that strong pull of unionized public employees that private employers have to compete with. I keep reading about American companies holding onto money, afraid to hire, though they obviously have the money to do so now if they wanted. So what are they really waiting for? I don't know, but it's hard to imagine they haven't overlooked the fact that the longer people remain unemployed, the more grateful they'll be for any work, and the less they'll agree to work for. So basically, if I'm understanding things correctly, economic crises benefit business and hurt workers of all kinds. And once you figure who benefits from a situation, you have to re-think the cause of it. Anyway, it's Friday afternoon, and I'm on my way out in a few minutes. I just had to write that thought before I forgot it.