The Theology of a Mormon Christian Atheist

A reflection on my faith in God, past and present, and a response to missionaries who try to recruit me to their faith.

Investigating the history of early Christianity did much to reshape completely the way I think about religion (all religion). I began my research believing that the Great Apostasy was historical, that there was a primitive church of Christ identifiable in history whose form was somehow perverted between 30-33 AD and 1820. When I read people like Martin Luther calling for a return to primitive Christianity, I thought they were speaking historically (as I think they often meant to, though neither they nor Joseph Smith ever really separated history from theology as much as moderns do). But the more I learned about early Christianity and the branches of the faith that survived to the present (and those that died), the less my original narrative made any sense. Today, I think the Great Apostasy is just the Mormon version of a widespread early Protestant delusion (that there was a unitary primitive Christian church and that our denomination represents its only or at least its most legitimate successor).

Paradoxically, I find myself agreeing with G. K. Chesterton, who called the Reformation an atheist movement. I see where he was wrong (not all Protestants are atheists), but for me (and many people I know, Mormon and not) he was right. Taking faith away from God (a mystery outside time and space) and putting it in history (specific events that happened or didn’t) and historical things (e.g. the Bible) leads people like me inevitably to atheism (when we read the holy books and the history and discover incoherence and human vanity masquerading as divine certainty all over the place).

I am not against God. I rather think I am for him, insofar as he represents good things about humanity. But when he represents pieces of humanity that I find abhorrent, I cannot support that (e.g. most of the OT, and even many sentiments in the New: the only books that I consistently read with enjoyment are Ecclesiastes, the Gospels, and James). The repeated claim that someone understands God better than someone else I find historically extremely problematic, since it is traditionally advanced in order to make one person subject (in ways that I find immoral) to another. Also, I don’t see the hand of God in history. A Deist god (the Platonic demiurge who sets the world going and then steps back to let it unwind ad libitum) I might admit as a possibility, but the problem of evil appears in my mind too large and glaring to be undone by the reassurance that poor children dying in agony as a result of natural disasters (leaving aside manmade ones for the moment) will be rewarded in another life. Why would a personal, loving God send tsunamis or tse-tse flies to torture small children, too little and ignorant to have done anything to warrant that kind of punishment? I cannot answer, and try as I might I don’t see God providing one in history. (All history provides is theologians telling Job to quit whining and consider that he is an idiot to trust his eyes. I don’t dispute that I am an idiot, or that my eyes can play tricks, but that doesn’t actually make life better--for me or the kids dying out there. I have spent years asking God, “Where is the pavilion covering thy hiding place?” and the only answer I get is that it is everywhere, everywhere and nowhere.)

I will confess too that I prefer models of divinity which make it less powerful (and/or less good), since these seem more like reality to me. I actually like the Mormon god(s) more than some versions of the Abrahamic one (worshipped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims), precisely because he is not (at least not necessarily) all-powerful, all-knowing, and the rest of it.  He is just a being like us, only at some remove. (Maybe he doesn’t send the tsunamis and tse-tse flies. Maybe he would block them if he could.) I like “pagan” gods (who like the universe are sometimes just dicks: Apollo gets mad for no real reason and starts killing people because he can, just like the tse-tse flies). But I also like the idea of God as something ineffable and impossibly remote (the reality outside our limited ability to understand or express): I just don’t see this reality as necessarily kind or cruel. Like the world, it is simply there, giving some of us sunshine and others tsunamis (kind of like Zeus reaching into his two jars and tossing blessings and curses at random on everybody).

The more I have interacted with believers and non-believers in all kinds of different traditions, the less I believe in the utility of “missionary work” (at least as it exists in most traditions historically). There is a place for sharing with others. We can help each other, and we can talk about the thoughts and practices that give our individual lives meaning, but it is presumptive and wrong-headed to insist that others come around to our ways and leave their own (against their will). There is nothing inherently superior in any historical religion, nothing that makes it objectively better for all people everywhere than whatever other religion they happen to be practicing at the moment. There are superior people, people who practice their religion better than other people, but their superiority is not a matter of transferrable doctrine or ritual but something integral to themselves, an expression of their individually outstanding moral character. We can learn from these people. We can respect them. But real learning and respect is not about wearing the clothes they wear, saying the prayers they say, believing the doctrines they believe, etc. It is about cultivating our own moral excellence, looking into the depths of our own spirit and bringing out the best aspects of the humanity that we find there. That humanity is not all-knowing or all-powerful or anything similar. It is weak. It makes mistakes. But it can learn from those mistakes. It can be kind as well as cruel. It can repent. It can find and cultivate all kinds of beauty in the strangest places. I believe in it. I believe in people, even if I find our gods mostly fictions (some more infantile than others, but in the end we are all just children playing in the sand, building castles that the tide washes away the way it always has).

Jung on the Unconscious (God?)

Carl Jung. Civilization in Transition. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. 1970 (2nd edition).  Princeton University Press.  ISBN: 0691097623.

This interesting quote (pp. 358-359, paragraph 678) caught my attention as I was returning this book to the library:

The differentiated function [reason, guided thought] undoubtedly depends on man, on his diligence, patience, perseverance, his striving for power, and his native gifts. With the aid of these things he gets on in the world and "develops." From this he has learnt that development and progress depend on man's own endeavours, his will and ability.  But that is only one side of the picture. The other side shows man as he is and as he finds himself to be. Here he can alter nothing, because he is dependent on factors outside his control. Here he is not the doer, but a product that does not know how to change itself. He does not know how he came to be the unique individual that he is, and he has only the scantiest knowledge of himself. Until recently he even thought that his psyche consisted of what he knew of himself and was a product of the cerebral cortex. The discovery of unconscious psychic processes more than fifty years ago is still far from being common knowledge and its implications are still not recognized. Modern man still does not realize that he is entirely dependent on the cooperation of the unconscious, which can actually cut short the very next sentence he proposes to speak. He is unaware that he is continuously sustained by something, while all the time he regards himself exclusively as the doer. He depends on and is sustained by an entity he does not know, but of which he has intimations and 'occurred' to--or, as we can more fitly say, revealed themselves to--long-forgotten forbears in the grey dawn of history. Whence did they come? Obviously from the unconscious processes, from that so-called unconscious which still precedes consciousness in every new human life, as the mother precedes the child. The unconscious depicts itself in dreams and visions, as it always did, holding before us images which, unlike the fragmented functions of consciousness, emphasizes facts that relate to the unknown whole man, and only apparently to the function which interests us to the exclusion of all else. Although dreams usually speak the language of our particular specialism--canis panem somniat, piscator pisces--they refer to the whole, or at the very least to what man also is, namely the utterly dependent creature he finds himself to be.

Jung's unconscious here sounds very close to what many people seem to mean when they use the word God.  All of us are larger than we know, containing and embodying processes larger than ourselves that constitute us and enable the decisions we have to make: we are all conditioned and constrained by an alien unknown that is at once external and internal.  We cannot understand this constraining factor.  We can only listen to it, and react to it (well or badly).

God vs. gods

Daniel Quinn.  The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit.  New York: Bantam, 1996.  ISBN 0553379011.

In my last post, I included this quote but did not really say much about it (Quinn, The Story of B, 300-301):

Let me begin with the great secret of the animist life, Louis.  When other people look for God, you'll see them automatically look up into the sky.  They really imagine that, if there's a God, he's far, far away--remote and untouchable.  I don't know how they can bear living with such a God, Louis.  I really don't.  But they're not our problem.  I've told you that, among the animists of the world, not a single one can tell you the number of the gods.  They don't know the number and neither do I...What's important to us is not how many they are but where they are.  If you go among the Alawa of Australia or the Bushmen of Africa or the Navajo of North America or the Onabasulu of New Guinea--or any other of hundreds of Leaver peoples [as opposed to Takers, the agriculturalists] I could name--you'll soon find out where the gods are.  The gods are here...I mean here.  Among the Alawa: here.  Among the Bushmen: here.  Among the Navajo: here.  Among the Kreen-Akrore: here.  Among the Onabasulu: here...

This isn't a theological statement they're making.  The Alawa are not saying to the Bushmen, 'Your gods are frauds, the true gods are our gods.' The Kreen-Akrore are not saying to the Onabasulu, 'You have no gods, only we have gods.  Nothing of the kind.  They're saying, 'Our place is a sacred place, like no other in the world.'  They would never think of looking elsewhere to find the gods.  The gods are to be found among them--living where they live.  The god is what animates their place.  That's what a god is.  A god is that strange force that makes every place a place--a place like no other in the world.  A god is the fire that burns in this place and no other--and no place in which the fire burns is devoid of god.  All of this should explain to you why I don't reject the name that was given to us by an outsider.  Even though it was bestowed with a false understanding of our vision, the name animism captures a glimmer of it.

Unlike the God whose name beings with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis.  Can you imagine that?  Any one of them can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb--silenced, driven away, enfeebled.  Sit in the middle of a shopping mall at midnight, surrounded by half a mile of concrete in all directions, and there the god that was once as strong as a buffalo or a rhinoceros is as feeble as a moth sprayed with pyrethrin.  Feeble, but not dead, not wholly extinguished.  Tear down the mall and rip up the concrete, and within days the place will be pulsing with life again.  Nothing needs to be done, beyond carting away the poisons.  The god knows how to take care of that place.  It will never be what it was before--but nothing is ever what it was before.  It doesn't need to be what it was before.  You'll hear people talk about turning the plains of North America back into what they were before the Takers arrived.  This is nonsense.  What the plains were five hundred years ago was not their final form, was not the final, sacrosanct form ordained for them from the beginning of time.  There is no such form and never will be any such form.  Everything here is on the way.  Everything here is in process.

The picture of deity given here is one that appeals to me a lot in the wake of my faith crisis.  Contrary to what many people seem to expect (and to what this blog may sometimes appear to indicate), my conversion to disbelief did not make me an immediate "expert" on life, the universe, and everything.  When people ask me "why?" now, I give them guesses (like the one I posted in my last entry) not once-and-for-all answers (like the truth I was certain of as a believer).  My lack of knowledge regarding the ultimate causes of things means that I am necessarily still comfortable with the idea of "unknowns" -- in theory, I have nothing against referring to these unknowns with names (like "God").  But in the wake of considering the world as I see it (and reading Quinn), I think "gods" is a better name for life's unknowns as I experience them than "God".  Let me try to explain what I mean by this.

In the world I live in, life consists of multiple mysterious systems in balance (from galactic star clusters down to atoms, with everything in between, including the planet's biosphere with its different ecosystems, and the bodies of individual plant and animal organisms, each of which is an ecosystem unto itself).  I cannot know what keeps these systems running (hence the mystery), but I can see that they are all running at different rates, in different ways, with different points of interface linking them to one another.  I see that when something disturbs the equilibrium of one system and not another (when someone runs my buddy over with a car but does not hit me, for example), the disturbed system suffers (and may die), while the undisturbed one continues on (to an inevitable dissolution: all systems are eventually recycled).  So each system has its own unknown, its own mysterious center of balance that holds it together until it falls apart: its own "god" (if you will).  My "god" (the unknown center of the complex of systems that is me) presides over the interface of several other "gods" within me (multi-organ systems, individual organs, cells, and independent organisms who live inside me), and is presided over in turn by other "gods" (which define the ecosystem that is my habitat, the planet that houses that ecosystem, etc.).  These "gods" are real.  I interact with them in a material and vital way every day.  They are also vulnerable.  As Quinn says, a flamethrower (or shopping mall) has the power to destroy or weaken them.  Unlike the almighty God I imagined as a Mormon, they represent something I might actually destroy in a careless fit of whatever it is that causes people to detonate bombs, deplete soils, and generally waste resources wantonly.

I am not adamantly opposed to the idea of some almighty uber-controller managing all systems: I do not deny the possibility that a big "God" exists out there somewhere.  But when I examine life as I experience it, it makes more sense to posit lots of smaller, more local, weaker "gods" who manage the mystery of life between them.  When I look into the world, I do not see a grand, unitary purpose rolling forward to inexorable fulfillment: I see multiple purposes, some realized and some not, some great and some small.  I do not know the causes for all things, but I do get the feeling that there are causes (in the plural) rather than a single cause (Aristotle's Prime Mover).  More urgently, I see that my previous focus on the possibility (which I regarded as a certainty) of a single ruling cause led me to neglect paying too much heed to smaller causes.  Since I assumed God was capable of restoring whatever havoc I might wreak in his world, I was not particularly worried about overtaxing the environment: I was philosophically down with killing many small (real) gods wantonly in the name of my big (imaginary) God.

Before you decide to ignore me as some kind of crazy, New Age hippie, you should know that I have no illusions about "saving the world" as it is.  Like Quinn says above, there are no eternal, Platonic forms for life as we experience it: it is a journey, not a destination.  Today's gods must die to make way for those of tomorrow.  I know this fact, and embrace it: life is death (as Heraclitus would say).  But I also know what follows from this: to waste death is to waste life.  If we kill all the bison for sport today, there will be none left when our grandchildren are hungry tomorrow.  If we strip all the soils down to bedrock today to feed our modern civilization, our grandchildren (billions of them) will have to discover some new life to take if the race is to continue.  Based on our past experience (the lessons of history as I read them), we cannot subsist happily writing blank checks for unlimited resources and hoping God (the big one) will honor them with manna from on high.  Rather than consume the small gods today and hope the big one sends us a fat paycheck tomorrow, picking up the tab for our indulgence, we need to cultivate the small gods: we need to refocus our efforts toward intelligent production.  Make every life lost count for something valuable, something that preserves (as much as possible) the integrity of the whole system as it moves into eternity.