Boztopia.com

Last week I had a major spiritual crisis that had me implanted on a metaphorical crossroads. Each path demanded a set of adherence to belief systems that held both valuable insights and codes I consider abhorrent. I was nearly in tears from the weight of feeling like I had to choose one way or another, and I knew that whatever path I took would determine the course of much of my life for a long time to come.

Luckily, I was in a New Age bookstore on Melrose at the time, so I had plenty of reading material with which to work through this, and in the end, I found my path and renewed my confidence. I want to share my moment of apotheosis/transcendence/meaningful creation with you, not because I want you to believe as I do, but because I feel that articulating this in a coherent prose form will help me understand it better. I hope you do get some amusement, enlightement, or entertainment out of it, of course. I may lose some friends or turn some of you off with what I say, but I have faith in the people whom I love and trust that it won’t happen.

And faith is at least partially what this is about.

Anyone who’s known me for a long time knows I have no truck with organized religion of any kind, even the one in which I was brought up (Judaism). Although I self-identify as a Jew and take pride in my culture and history, I don’t believe in the religion (which I view as distinct from the culture) any more than I do Christianity, Islam, Wicca, or any other -ism you can name. Organized religion has brought us great beauty, culture, art, and achievement, but it’s also brought us untold horror, war, genocide, and oppression. At the core, my problem with religion is the believer’s desire to make others believe as they do. Many people are comfortable enough in their own beliefs that they focus on living up to the tenets of their faith and not demanding that others adhere. Unfortunately, this is the exception, which is how you get scenarios like the Texas State Board of Education demanding that creationism be considered a theory of equal value to be taught in their textbooks. The massive resistance to that is not only heartening, but it helped me understand what’s so poisonously hypocritical about zealotry–deep down inside, these people want the rest of us to believe as they do because they know that, as it stands, they can’t compete on equal footing in the world at large. Their kids will get laughed at. So they try to homogenize the world to fit their dogma and make sure that everyone thinks as they do. Problem solved!

By any standard, I should be an atheist, or at least a secular humanist. As far back as I can remember, I have created my own moral structure to guide myself in the world. My parents didn’t neglect this or not teach me values or anything like that, but I don’t honestly remember a time when my values system was forged in anything other than the meaning I choose to give it. The principles I uphold–reason, justice, fairness, compassion, kindness, pacifism–and the paths I choose–education, investigation, skepticism (as opposed to cynicism)–fit that paradigm to a tee. I’m a devout believer in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and the tenets of the Humanist Declaration sound like they were written with Martin Bosworth in mind. (Seriously–go back and read anything I’ve written in the last five years and tell me I’m wrong. )

But.

I don’t find myself persuaded by people like Dawkins or Hitchens any more than I do their opposite numbers among the imams, bishops, etc.. Even atheist freethinkers like Eric Maisel, who are much more positively focused on building a life of meaning without the divine as opposed to just tearing God down, still place heavy emphasis on the idea of the believer as somehow less than the nonbeliever. That you are somehow handicapped or weaker for believing is just as foul as the reverse. To be Other is not to be less. It’s simply to be different.

More than that, I can’t disavow or deny the otherworldly experiences I’ve had. How many times have you tried to get any work done during a Mercury retrograde, for instance? I’ve lived through too many of those to count, and to say that this is just random, unconnected chaos is like saying UFO sightings are caused by weather balloons. (What the hell IS a weather balloon, anyway?)  The explanation is even more nonsensical than the experience, but we take it because it sounds rational.

I’ve had precognitive dreams as long as I can remember–dreams that specifically envisioned events that took place months or years into the future, which rendered them utterly nonsensical to me–but when my timeline reached that moment, I had a flash of intuitive insight so profound that I altered my course of action, and invariably chose a better path. You can torture me like Winston Smith, but I will go to my grave knowing–not believing, knowing–that these things happened.

Every time I reach for the pad and pen, or put my fingers to the keyboard, I can sense that connection to the larger force that inspires creativity–the primal soup or ether from which all ideas flow. Everyone from Bob Dylan to Ron Moore has touched that world when they’ve envisioned their idea. It’s another dimension, the world without time, the unbound sea with an endless horizon, from which anyone can look out on and say, “Yeah, I will sail those waters.”

Some call it “God.” Others say it’s “The Void.” Stephen King called it “The Prim.” But it doesn’t matter, because it’s the living embodiment of creation–mind forming matter from nothingness, the idea giving birth to itself. The belief that we choose, and in choice we give form to dreams, making them real. That’s the key that both atheists and religious zealots miss. The former doesn’t understand that being linked to this source doesn’t make us any less powerful for choosing to create, or building meaningful lives, and the latter doesn’t understand that this is a force of nature to be respected, not some all-powerful omniscient deity that is inordinately concerned with my sex life.

I thoroughly reject the idea that human nature is innately violent, sinful, cruel, or capricious, and that our natures are fixed in stone, immutable. Indeed, as Matt Ridley has expertly postulated, we are in a constant state of evolution, shaped and reshaped by our environments, our choices, our experiences, and our heritage. Put more simply, I know a lot of people who think humans are generally worthless, but very few people who would self-identify themselves as worthless. (Villains? Hell yeah, because that’s sexy. But not worthless.) So it’s not you who’s innately sinful, it’s all those other guys.

Bullshit.

The journey of humanity has always been about overcoming our origins as beasts, as animals ruled by impulses and genetic programming to survive. Every time we choose a higher path than simple subsistence, every time we refuse the common wisdom, every time we step away from the pack, and every time we choose to rejoin the pack for a higher purpose than the tyranny of the mob, we take another step along that journey. We can make of our natures more than we are, while at the same time realizing that what we dismiss as “the supernatural” is simply another person’s way of shaping the world and creating for themselves a meaningful existence. Everything from prayer to the Tarot, from astrology to vampires, has its place in the universe. “Science” versus “faith,”is to me a false dichotomy, as simplistic and useless as “black and white,” “gay or straight,” “liberal or conservative,” etc. It’s the same tactic we fall into time and again–defining ourselves by what we are not, as opposed to what we are. We build tribes to protect ourselves from the Outsider, the Other, and end up perpetrating the same ostracism we claim to be against.

So can a secular humanist embrace the supernatural and otherworldly while rejecting zealotry from both believers and nonbelievers alike? Yes, I think so. We live in a time when all known paradigms are being reshaped. Some violently, some peacefully, but it is happening nonetheless. Probably one of the biggest paradigm shifts we have to push is against the idea that reason and faith cannot coexist, and indeed, thrive, as part of a healthy belief system that tests, examines, chooses, and investigates, yet still keeps its mind open to all possibilities.

Outside my window there’s a giant, lush tree filled with birds whose chirping wakes me up every morning to start my day refreshed and ready. Next to it is a telephone pole and a long trail of wires that connect me to the larger world. Is one of these “better” because it’s inherently natural? Is the other better because we created it? Or are they meant to coexist in the world we create, finding a balance as both natural and technological?

I know what I chose. I chose to explore, to step off the path of familiar, well-trod cliches and immerse myself in alternative histories, quantum philosophies, and all the other things we politely (or sometimes impolitely) dismiss as crazy, while at the same time approaching my daily life with humanistic principles in mind. I investigate, I critique, I look for patterns (even knowing that there may be none), and I never accept that anything is as simple as it seems, or that there is only one way of looking at the world.

I realized that this has been the path I’ve trod for many years now, and I was simply refreshing my faith in myself, my knowledge that I was on the right course. I don’t need or desire anyone to follow me, and I would only ask that you find the right course for yourself. If our courses should collide, then so be it. But no matter what happens, we will know that we are both fully realized beings that create meaningful lives for ourselves, while simultaneously reveling in the amazing wonder that is the natural universe.

I’m okay with that.