Here is an excerpt from that article:
I understood my atheism as an achievement, but it didn’t inspire any further achievements. My only creative impetus was to dramatize my own condition, my only critical one to despiritualize everyone else’s. I didn’t deny the good, the true, or the beautiful, but I certainly denied any supernatural grounds for them. All my strength went into demystification, and once those ideals became secular norms, they didn’t excite me. I’d lost God, and whatever his replacement might be (helping others, making money) left me cold.
I found a career in academia, one that tallied my loss of faith and love of great books in workable ways. Never did I feel out of place in my unbelief, and so, as the semesters passed, the roguish aspect of my atheism diminished. No more shock over the fact of mortality and no more self-promotion into an elite band of thinkers and seers, just an occasional shiver when alone and undistracted, plus a routine conviction that I was more educated and clear-sighted than ordinary people.
While I never regarded religion as evil or sought to disabuse the faithful, any pressure I felt from Christian quarters might easily spark a contemptuous response. I might admire the conviction of the believer and the good deeds of the church, and crisis-of-faith stories still had their appeal, but faith lay on the other side of a mental wall. I didn’t sense the existence of God, and so I couldn’t understand the motive for religious expression as anything but ideological or subjective. I could understand, however feebly, what it was like to be rich or black or a father or a little kid, but I could sit in church for a whole year and not “get” the experience of the people sitting beside me one bit. I couldn’t reify God or contemplate God, not even from a skeptical distance. God was just a token abstraction.
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ReplyDeleteThe following exchange is from comments made about this post on facebook:
ReplyDeleteFROM JORDAN:
This was a frustrating read. It was akin to those "deconversion from Christianity" articles where someone realizes that the war in Iraq was wrongheaded, and that therefore evangelicalism's wrong (or something equally dubious).
For one, there are dozens of (atheist) ontologies that defy the one he proposes at the beginning. Bauerlein is correct in his assessment of the unwarranted assertions many atheists lob at the religious; but for every Dawkins there's a Fyfe or a Bryant. And there are atheist humanists, atheist Buddhists, atheists nihilists, (and yes, even) atheist Christians.
What I read is the exchanging of no tradition/community for a tradition/community; what atheists largely lack *is precisely* a healthy community. Which is understandable, given how little most people know about real, living atheists and atheism, and how many folks cannot even associate themselves with it for fear of relational breakdown, abandonment and the abuse or derision that comes alongside.
I'm happy for him; it sounds like he is, personally, better off this way. I don't think I'll be following suit.
FROM DAVE BURKUM:
Jordan - I think you're right about Bauerlein exchanging "no tradition/community for a tradition/community," but I think there was also a little more than that. I think he was confessing the exchange of smug self-assurance for humble self-denial. Smug and uncritical atheism seems to have been the type of atheism Bauerlein embraced. I appreciate Bauerlein's rejection of the uncritical self-satisfied sort of atheism, but you are right--there are certainly other humble and self-critical forms of atheism that might have helped him accomplish the same thing.
FROM JORDAN:
But just are there are a minority of atheists who are not *smug and self-satisfied*, so too it is only a minority of believers who similarly qualify. The person, not the worldview, seems to be the qualifier.
FROM DAVE BURKUM:
Agreed. Sad, but true. So what makes the person? What is it that helps people move toward self-critical humility?
FROM JORDAN:
I think it may be the Jamesian healthy soul/sick soul split. What constitutes that? I don't know. I've been thinking about that a lot. I think there are points of similarity with Bruce Schneier's discussions of trust, of conformity and the necessity for a minority (but no more) of defection in any system in order to maintain innovation and stave off collapse. It's the necessity of "work" in social systems to maintain a sense of self apart from the environment in the face of entropy.