Religion, Atheism, and Dying

Two years ago around this time I met weekly with a former professor of psychology from UPenn who, because of his age and ailments, attended a nursing home. To put it abruptly, my job was to baby sit him with the probing questions of an enthusiastic grad student. He was bored and desperate to feel engaged, just like the good ol’ days, and I was happy to meet with him.

I liked the idea then as much as I do now. Who in their right mind would pass up speaking with a highly-educated Third Reich atheist about religious experience?

Because as a rule old people nearing death no longer give a damn. They are candid. They have either abandoned formalities and niceties because they’re out of time or because they’re out of their minds. Both are excellent.

Sure you have some who are shy about their last vestiges of consciousness, but the honest ones know they don’t have time for that. Whether someone is religious or not, death is a practical matter. The epitaph must be decided upon, the will and testament drafted. The aged know this best of all. Even before then, in youth, measures are taken to prolong physical well-being, thought is given to how or even if to live a good life while death looms (somewhere) on the horizon.

As such, I have not forgotten the old professor’s words to me. “It may be,” he said contemplatively, “that I need God in my dying moments. I do not know. But I don’t think I will. I can live with the fact of dying.”

Immediately upon hearing this, a Faulkner quote passed through my mind. “It’s not when you realize nothing can help you,” says Quentin, “—religion, pride, anything. It’s when you realize you don’t need any aid.”

For the brief moments I walked this earth as an atheist I had to mark with honesty that both Quentin’s and the professor’s words, and that my similar position, was an instance of atheistic psycho-linguistic therapy disguised as bravery and strength. Fascinatingly, the very act of naming or categorizing the event gave me control over my ominous future by giving me a designator inadvertently designed to stifle anxiety.

That is, the “rage against the dying of light” ceased when I compacted all my premonitions of death into a designator whose grammatical function was to enact acquiescence—which is to say emotional passivity.[1] It was not Christian hope and therefore not Christian therapy, but it was atheistic passivity and therefore atheistic therapy. It's not totally unlike Buddhism, really. Different method and emotions, same result--though not in degree.

What I thought was that I was being brave by shedding the hope associated to Christianity and simply ‘facing the fact of death.’ But in reality each time I spoke or thought about my death  as something I had ‘accepted,’ I blindly drank the very cup I accused the Christians of drinking.

For all my admiration of Sisyphus, I could not help but wonder what attracted him to pushing the boulder in the first place. What function did it serve him if not a therapeutic function? Why not roller-skate instead or get high? Why not wallow or, for me, believe in better/more effective therapeutic measures? For if both we atheists and Christians are unconsciously seeking therapeutic measures, and the absurd problem still faces us, why opt for the lousier of the two? Such were my thoughts at the time. 

What I realized was that all the mental toughness self-attributed by (certain) atheists to themselves can be reduced to mental tenderness in light of the fact that they still seek or simply find themselves with therapeutic counter-measures.

My omnipresent brain editor William James likewise accuses atheists of being intellectually tender for merely ‘facing the fact of death’ because it is symptomatic of the need to satisfy the demands of Western man’s obsession with the ultima ratio, the total ‘filling in’ of one’s worldview (a point Heidegger would like, too). According to James, to quantify death fits neatly into the modern rationalist’s tendency to ‘need an answer’ and ignores any degree of mental discomfort over the possibility for alternative explanation—which here means incomplete explanation and for James means pluralistic explanation. To put it differently, it’s the comfort epistemology well known to religious enterprises manifesting in an atheistic way through atheistic language (a point which amounts to a very Eliadaian extrapolation, I’m proud to say).

   

In the history of my life, I’ve supported any number of versions and competing therapeutic narratives. The more popular Protestant version of it here in America appears in conservative comfort theology, where foreign philosophizing and theologizing are simply ignored for the fear of paradigm shifting. Above all my ideologies hovers the eternal cloud (smog?) of this fundamentalism. I shall forever be haunted by it. I supported it in my youth and abandoned it in adulthood. Most of my family still operates inside of it. In most cases, this tough-faith approach is mental tenderness manifesting as mental stupidity. The methods used by this class are so dubious that even those within the Christian tradition recognize it as mental tenderness. 

The other and less popular version (in America) of Protestant mental toughness is more sophisticated, and usually appears as an argument from authority based on faith—which is to say an argument for Catholicism without the Pope. I myself currently belong somewhere between this class and a religious pluralist. They/we believe in such and such based on the legitimacy of these traditions: insert list here with accompanying propositional, historiological, metaphysical and other such reasoned paraphernalia. To this class, one can market the advances of philosophy and science with much less push back. For Protestants in this set, mental toughness means not breaking at each newly learned or refined philosophy, but instead a steady metamorphosis toward more complete faith. Even doubt works within the mechanism, and oddly becomes a garment of faith itself. So tough are the Christians in this set that they’ll listen to pretty much anything without dropping their belief.

In the case of Christianity—not to mention religious systems like it—the popular criticism against it is obvious. Death is so horrifying that people are willing to believe crazy shit to circumvent the void. Religion is by many estimations (which is to say Atheist/Agnostic) the tender-est of the bunch simply in virtue of being the most obnoxious relative to the wisdom of the scientific era and Ockham’s razor—a point that standing by itself is pretty naïve but is often rhetorically convincing. 

Every system, I imagine, has their ‘death solution.’ Buddhism solves the death problem simply by never letting anyone die. Atheism plays dodge ball. Islam, if I understand it right, solves the problem in much the same way as Protestantism. Agnosticism, to oversimplify, doesn’t have a fucking clue what to do with any of it so it finds distractions (of a Pascalian sort) or despairs (of  Kierkegaardian sort) and is thus restless (of an Augustinian sort). Catholicism and Dante toss you purgatory and time to work out the kinks. And early rabbinical Judaism contribute retribution theory to the mix after simply neglecting the possibility for an afterlife. I suspect that with a little work you might locate the “tenderness” in any tradition.

Because what is meant by tenderness of mind, I’m sure you’ve noticed, is relative and informed by someone’s weltanschauung. James thinks dogmatist (of any degree and of any worldview) are tender because they need to feel complete, where James is satisfied being tough in the open-endedness of pragmatism/pluralism. Atheists (and sometimes agnostics) think James and religious folk are tender because they can’t face the misery of ‘shuffling off this mortal coil.’ And Christians (probably other religions as well) find James tender for lacking the requisite faith to be dogmatic and the atheists tender for lacking the requisite faith to have hope. It’s a rough summary, but with a little gerrymandering, I think you can see the truth in it. Or, at least, I’ve bought into something like this story for the time being.

In the end, we are, I am, at my core, deeply concerned with dying, my own death and other’s. In my mind, Heidegger was right to locate the human problem as the ‘throwness’ problem, the inevitability of death problem, and wrong to depend on that finitude to enable Dasien to ‘care.’ But I certainly understand the appeal. 

It's true; they don't teach us this in our temples; they teach the opposite.

And the “one short sleep past we wake eternally” is the answer par excellence to Christianity. Probably in large part due to my background it remains the par excellence narrative to me. So powerful was Paul's "death has lost its sting" revelation that many early Christians were signing up to become martyrs, and I have always been attracted to it.

Even still, Christianity by and large has neglected the value space of the finite, either subjecting the finite to an Augustinian critique and devaluation, or, more regularly, being totally oblivious to its existence. Both are probably atrocious underestimations of its importance. Chesterton is about the only Christian I've ever noted to have noted it on its own terms. His model is essentially Humean, though I have no space/time to deal with it here.

Ah well, I'll have to write another blog. I'm afraid 3 pages is already too much. Kevin out.

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[1] I think of Freudian psycho-therapy as an example. In Freud the utterable or at least conscious retrieval of the traumatic memory supplies the patient with a designator or a pointer to a designator—be it an image, phrase, word, or all of the above—with which they can quantify and measure that event. You might call the quantifying act a naming act. Once it’s named it can be manipulated and either purposively shoved forever back into the subconscious (whatever that is) or placed ‘out in the open’ for further repairs to the psyche. Once the cause is diagnosed, which is to say identified and named, the effect no longer permeates because the cause is no longer a cause; it’s just another designator in an ever evolving idiolect.

As such, the cause designator gives the patient the equipment for accepting, combating, or revalorizing his/her present experience in, quite literally, new terms. More often than not, what was originally a cause becomes a designator designed (consciously or unconsciously) by the agent to be therapeutic. (The same thing, by the way, occurs when husbands and wives come home from work and ‘get things off their chest’ through ‘talking it out.’)