Is You Is, Or Is You Ain't?

I don't know who I drive crazier, my atheist friends or the God who may or may not be there.

My atheist friends would like to write me off as some sort of religious-right wingnut, I'm sure. The problem with that is, I haven't been anywhere near a church in more than 25 years.

If there is a God, my relationship with him could best be described as adversarial. You see, I decided years ago that if there is a God, he (a) doesn't like me, or (b) has a decidedly juvenile sense of humor. (For example, he seems to get hand-rubbing glee out of ordering traffic signals to turn red the second they see me coming. Moreover, he seems to have issued a blanket command to any and all things mechanical that they should figure out some way to malfunction the moment they smell me in the room.)

On the other hand, I really can't make up my mind who I like less: God or the people who go around telling us that he doesn't exist. Really, I'm hard put to decide who's more insufferable: the man upstairs or his dismissers.

This thought came to mind in the past week due to two events: the death of science-fiction author Arther C. Clarke at age 90, and my own experience just yesterday of stumbling across the website of some atheist in Scotland.

Since Clarke's death came first, I'll address it first.

I was a huge fan of Arthur C. Clarke when I was a boy. The reason was easy and obvious: I was 13 when 2001: A Space Odyssey hit the theaters. The film overwhelmed me, and I immediately became a fan of sci-fi in general and of Clarke in particular. At 14 and 15 I was reading everything of his that I could get my hands on. I aspired to be a science-fiction writer myself. That lasted until, at age 16, I discovered Hemingway and my enthusiasm switched tracks, from the sci-fi genre to mainstream fiction. By the middle of my junior year of high school I was pretty much over the science fiction craze. That was okay, though; I'd read just about everything of Clarke's by then anyway. Oh, I came back once or twice. Rendezvous With Rama (1974)I thought clever, even if, by age 19, I was beginning to find Clarke's prose tiresomely pedestrian. Much later I dipped into the various sequels to 2001, ultimately deciding in the name of charity that he was only fulfilling contractual requirements by writing these clunky things. In the last one, 3001, he'd gotten so careless as to have one of the astronauts on a 2001 space mission born in 1996!

As much as I admired Clarke's writing in my youth, in television interviews I found him about as compelling as a common brick. His occasional attempts at humor were...British, which is to say not very funny. And of course he was always espousing his proud atheism, which I suppose was supposed to make us think he was a bold, brave, unflinching advocate of pure science. Cool. But he also made, in the name of atheism, one of the stupidest remarks I ever heard. He was on Dick Cavett or Merv Griffin or one of those talk shows in the mid-1970s, and of course when someone brought up the subject of religion he became very dismissive, saying that while he didn't consider it inconceivable that a personality might somehow resurface after death, the idea of a soul surviving the death of the body made as little sense as -- get this -- "thinking the symphony still exists after the grammophone record has been destroyed."

Now, take a deep breath and think about that statement for a moment. Clarke was telling us that, if he were to pick up a record of Beethoven's 5th Symphony and break it into pieces, that meant Beethoven's 5th Symphony no longer existed.

An unfortunate analogy? No, I don't feel charitable this morning; Let's leave it at "stupid."

I have found that my atheist friends not only often make unfortunate analogies, but they're very good at bandying around cliches that have beards as long as Bill Clinton's nose when he talks about "that woman." And all the while they want us to believe that they're uttering profound, original and above all, brave wisdom. "If there's a God, why is there suffering in the world? Why were there Nazis?" Well, I don't know. But I'll tell you this much. The great Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn endured much worse at the hands of Stalin's henchmen than most of you atheists ever endured from Nazis, and he didn't lose his faith. In fact he rediscovered it and it was strengthened by his experiences. Who's right, you or him? (Hint: I have more respect for him than I do for you, and for obvious reasons.)

An atheist web site got a lot of publicity recently when it encouraged young people in particular to declare their bravery by blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. The Bible apparently says somewhere that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the only unforgivable sin. Blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, reads the message, in fact do it loudly! Challenge God to strike you down with a thunderbolt. If he doesn't, you've proven the truth of atheism! Well, maybe. Then again, maybe God just looks at these bold little blasphemers, (most of whom think "lol" is a word, by the way) rubs his hands in glee and tells the traffic signal to turn red when they're already 15 minutes late for class. Why not? He does that kind of shit to me all the time, and I've never blasphemed against the Holy Spirit in my life. I don't even know who the Holy Spirit is. Do you?

Since I mentioned Stalin, let's talk about him for a minute. My atheist friends who go around humming John Lennon's "Imagine" want us to think, as Lennon did in that unbearably juvenile song, that if only we could ditch all this silly religion stuff the world would become a big warm bath of peace and brotherhood. Uh-huh. John Lennon and Josef Stalin would have gotten along splendidly. Stalin took a real, genuine shot at creating the godless utopia Lennon praises so fulsomely in some of the most puerile lyrics of his generation, ("And no religion too." Gimme a break!) and only a complete idiot, a horse-blindered true believer on the level of Jean-Paul Sartre, (who never left Paris) would try to tell you that Stalin's Moscow was a great place for a vacation. But religion was outlawed, so it must have a been a big orgy of brotherhood, right?

And then there's the "cranky uncle" angle, most recently on display in Barack Obama's speech defending his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah "Josef Goebbels" Wright. Atheists tend to fit the cranky uncle mold, by which I mean they tend to be Little Johnny One-Notes. Attacking religious belief on blogs and in op-ed length letters to the editor is their chief, consuming passion.

Which brings me to my visit to the blog yesterday of some doofus in Scotland.

I was doing a search on "Woody Allen's 'The Moose.'" If you don't know this classic five-minute monologue, go look it up. It's one of the funniest things Woody ever did. I wanted to find out when he did it, as in, what year. Turns out it was 1965. But in the course of my search I stumbled across an atheist's blog. As you might expect, aside from Woody Allen, it was pretty much an all-atheist show.

Now, to what extent, I ask you, is this kind of obsessiveness any less mephitic than that of some Bible-pounder who won't shut up about Jesus for two minutes? Ask any atheist what his ten favorite books are. Eight of them will be books on atheism. The other two will be Harry Potter.

There's a word for such people on Dictionary.com: "Bore: (noun) 2. a dull, tiresome, or uncongenial person."

While I don't find God an especially attractive figure, (I think seeing Michaelangelo's bad-tempered curmudgeon creating the world on the Sistine ceiling, in a Time-Life book called The World's Great Religions when I was about eight years old, permanently placed a mental image in my head of God as a grumpy old bastard) neither am I taken in by the "peace and brotherhood" message of the You-may-say-I'm-a-dreamer, but-I'm-not-the-only-one crowd. My friend Michael is a loud-mouthed, truculent atheist who tends to win arguments by outshouting his opponents. But even he would have trouble out-shouting the track record of atheism for producing peace, love and brotherhood. If he chucks that tired "Spanish Inquisition" thing at me, I can just easily chuck back at him Kim Jong Il, beloved leader of the North Korean atheist paradise, crushing the skulls of Christians with a steamroller. And the Spanish Inquisition was 550 years ago. Kim Jong Il is still with us, unfortunately.

Finally, I just don't like the implications of a world run by a committee of atheists. Stalin and his acolyte John Lennon aside, there is a reason for Kim Jong Il, as there was for Heinrich Himmler. It's the logical bus stop that atheism must, by its very nature, lead to. Atheists will tell you that the human race doesn't need God to be good. That may be true, but neither can it thrive on nothingness. Buddhism doesn't have any notion of a ruling intelligence,(hence its attractions for anti-authoritarian types like my ex-friend Ray, who rejected the Catholicism of his father because he didn't get along with his father) but lacking a deity or not, Buddhism is still a religion. It finds meaning in the realm of the human spirit that transcends what Joyce called the "Ineluctable modality of the visible."

There is a good reason why communism, "the god that failed," failed. It was totally based on determinist materialism, the same essential idea at the core of atheist Richard Dawkins' particular flavor of Darwinism. Communism had no transcendent side. All it promised was that the workers would throw off their chains and seize the means of production on the great getting-up morning. And that wasn't enough to revolutionize mankind. "New Soviet Man" was still man: grubby, grasping, self-interested and very much in need of his better angels, but thrown back on his own resources, if he cared to cultivate his spiritual side, because he lived under a state that denied the spiritual dimension of life in favor of a dull, gray materialism that insisted on seeing nothing in the world but things.

That reductionist materialism can lead to the good life by forcing people to "relate to each other instead of to some imaginary god" is a crock of shit. The world that Dawkins and his cohort are trying to sell, a universe that is only blind and random chemical and electromagnetic chain reactions with no purpose except to keep running like a perpetual motion machine until it runs down, is a place where nothing has any meaning or purpose whatever. It's a place where children wearing black overcoats open fire with high-powered rifles on the grounds of public schools, then shoot themselves. Loathe as I am to cite C.S. Lewis, it's a universe that resembles his vision of Hell.

That universe lacks not only meaning, but right and wrong, up and down, hope, values or charity (Yes, I said charity. Nietzche was a syphilitic whose rejection of human sympathy was a symptom of his sickness. And as for Albert Camus, the atheistic saints of The Plague are as puerile a fantasy as John Lennon's.) This warm and wonderful world in which moral equivalency reigns supreme is the end product of what the new atheists are pitching: in a black, meaningless void whose only destiny is just-as-meaningless nonexistence, well, as the man said, everything is permitted, from Nazis frying Jews in ovens to those two nice little boys we read about last year who tortured a puppy to death by roasting it alive.

I may have problems with the idea of God, but I don't want to live in that world. Michael can live in that world if he wants to, but I'm with Bob Dylan, who said "Negativity won't pull you through." (He said that, by the way,long before his so-called Born-again Christian period.)

Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and their ilk are pushing negativity as the wave of the future. They can have it and it can have them. They can also shove up their collective asses their smug, snotty attitude that because they don't believe in God, that makes them smarter and more sophisticated than the rest of us. What utter, preening bullshit. What they're really trying to do is pass off their stunted imaginations as signs of higher intelligence. They aren't capable of imagining anything greater than themselves, therefore they sneer at those who are and call them stupid.

My father was like that. If he couldn't see something, that meant it wasn't there. If his puny imagination couldn't wrap itself around a concept, that meant it wasn't true. Like the atheist crowd, he mistook that shortcoming in himself for wisdom, and scoffed at anything he didn't understand.

And don't come back and tell me about what a wonderful imagination Arthur C. Clarke had. It's true, he did have a fertile imagination, grounded moreover in a rock-solid background of scientific learning. That science has become the modern substitute for religion in the past century is a subject for another discussion, but Clarke, while brilliant, was one of those scientists whose logic led him to cultivate a huge blind spot concerning the entire spiritual dimension of life. He was capable of imagining bases on the moon, spaceships propelled by giant sails catching the solar wind, and even, fifty years ahead of its time, something like the Internet. But, like the architects of Soviet communism, his world was one that consisted of nothing but things. And he threatened to do some pretty dreadful things in the name of scientific truth, like erasing Beethoven from history by breaking a record album. Man, I'm scared, boys, ain't you scared?

My belief that the opening fugue of Beethoven's C-sharp Minor String Quartet will be playing somewhere in the universe long after all the Arthur Clarkes and Richard Dawkinses have fallen as silent as their empty, antiseptic souls is all the belief I need. But it's plenty, and its implications are great. My atheist friends won't see that of course. Because they can't. They aren't capable of it. Beethoven's Op. 131 Quartet is one of the most profound spiritual statements ever made. People for whom the word "spiritual" has no meaning, people who reduce music to nothing but vibrations that tickle certain areas of the brain, just as they try to reduce all life to chemical and electromagnetic interactions with no underlying purpose, might as well not bother listening. They can just go listen to themselves talk. Sooner or later they'll shut up. But Beethoven, whose belief was profound, and finds its most sublime expression in that opening fugue, will play on.