have a narrow fir tree, with all its limbs being packed tightly together, while a tolerant, open-minded person would have a spacious oak, with branches spreading luxuriantly far apart from each other. Such a cultivated observer of life can entertain disparate and even contradictory thoughts in their head at the same time, without judging or deciding prematurely.
Keats, in a famous passage from a letter:
“…and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reasons.”
Reader, we should be able to dwell in mystery, to abide in its bracing air, like the Sherpas in the Himalayas. That is what frightens me so much about the dogmatists today on all sides: they acknowledge no mystery, they have no questions. People should have questions.
5.
If the secular worldview were more attractive to the general public then organized religion wouldn’t find it so easy to gain followers. But people all over the world have been flocking to Christianity and Islam for centuries. Do you know why? Obviously, primarily because monotheistic faiths have compelling narratives that tap into the human psyche. That mysterious, troublesome instrument seems to require that some supervening order, some more meaningful, palatable pattern be placed over the chaotic scrim and welter of the world.
But there is a socioeconomic aspect to religion’s continuing ability to attract adherents as well. Here it is in a nutshell: Jesus is fair. He stands up for the little guy. In fact, he is positively blue-collar. Remember all that about throwing away your belongings, and how it’s easier for a camel to be threaded through a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven? As for Islam, Allah is just, and merciful. Muslims are required to give alms to the poor, and generally be compassionate and supportive toward those in need. I stress that this is a formal requirement, not an option.
Formal religions are accepting of all--all!—who accept the Creator’s Word. Name any other group in modern society, whether it be social, political, economic, what have you—that is as egalitarian, as welcoming, as humane as the major religions are in theory.. (Bonus points for the one major world religion to which you cannot convert.) Yes, yes, I know: the positively medieval, patriarchal superstructure that has wrapped itself around the religions like a strangler vine, the behavior and mores of the believers themselves...these factors more often than not seem sufficient cause to dismiss the whole endeavor. Still, look at the actual statistics: most people in the world believe in a supreme being, and most regard themselves as being at least loosely affiliated with one of the major religions. And again, I can’t help but think that if global social and economic conditions were better—more fair, more just, with opportunity evenly distributed-- the secular path would be more appealing to citizens of all kinds.
Because secular has somehow devolved into economic laissez-faire, which means Walmart, Wall Street, and Amazon run the world. Do those institutions have at their core—or even at the periphery, or faintly visible on the horizon—a self-imposed mandate to care for the welfare of others? And if the secular way is so superior, then why are governments failing so miserably to meet the major challenges of our time? Environmental challenges, economic challenges, educational challenges…here, do your best version of a modern-day Diogenes: go around the world and try to find one citizen who is truly satisfied with the job his or her government is doing. Why not? Plenty of people are perfectly happy with their local grocery store, their cable provider, even their kid’s school. But not their government. Think about it: if global citizen were asked to pick the aspect of their lives which they were least satisfied with, many if not most would pick their own leaders and the political institutions. The reasons are multifarious (regulatory capture and plain corruption, extreme, system-jamming partisanship, etc.), but probably most prominent is the simple, incontrovertible fact that governments are failing to provide better lives for their citizens. And, to hopefully return us full circle to our starting point, organized religion, which is the natural enemy of any rational, individualistic and truly democratic political or social structure, wastes no time in stepping into the breach. “They won’t take care of you? We will.” The ironic thing is that the church doesn’t even do a great job anymore of taking care of people’s physical needs, things like food and shelter. They don’t have to; they merely have to make it look like they are trying hard and acting in good faith, while coldhearted governments flounder.
6.
There is no getting around the central fact that for us, a butterfly is an amazing natural organism whose existence is made even more astounding and meaningful by its aleatory, Darwinian nature. Roll the dice again and that gorgeous Monarch you see on the leaf would not exist; or at a minimum, there would be differences in coloration or behavior. To us, everything, no matter how essential, beautiful, or fascinating it might be, is necessarily contingent. It’s part of the philosophical worldview of a rational secular humanist, and not always the easiest part. It could be compared to having to tolerate hate speech in America, which is protected under the First Amendment. Not easy, but gotta be done. Hewing to science means hitching your wagon to a star, a real star, magnificent but remote and absolutely indifferent to all human concerns.
This of course is anathema to the true believers. In their universe, there is a Prime Mover and thus a master-plan. That Monarch gently opening and closing its gorgeous wings could not be other than what it is. Omniscience and omnipotence leave not the slightest sliver of room for accident, for chance. And all parts of nature must be connected to us somehow, because after all, we are the Jewel in the Crown.
7.
So to them, we are simply Godless, and thus lost. To us, they are dupes, adults who still believe in Santa Claus. Let us agree on our side for a moment that, sadly enough, there is no Santa Claus busy in his workshop. Fellow seculars, I want you to take a short imaginary journey with me. Pretend it’s late December, and you are walking down the streets of any North American city. I will spare you a description of all the Christmas paraphernalia, but assume it is there in full force. Now, find your average child, pining for Xbox, a bicycle, etc. He has just written a letter to the North Pole, asking for said toy of his dreams. Look into his eyes, dancing with visions of ...errr, not sugarplums, but first-person shooters—well, you get the idea. Can you honestly say that Santa doesn’t….exist? “But that’s cheating, of course he exists in people’s minds! So do UFO’s and unicorns and Big Foot!” Exactly. These beings, to which the cosmos (Carl Sagan’s cosmos, and yours and mine) is absolutely indifferent, live in people’s minds. And where, pray tell, do you live? “But in my mind there’s no magic Jesus, or all-powerful guy with white hair being jealous all the time and calling all the shots, or unicorns for that matter!” More’s the pity. About the unicorns, I mean. All joking aside, I am simply trying to carve out a bit of space, a narrow niche or ledge of humaneness, if you will, on which I now precariously rise to say: the things that other people believe—wacky or misguided or unsupported by any of the laws of the observable universe as they might seem to us—come from humanity itself, from people’s hopes, fears, and passions. They are not nothing. At least acknowledge that, my fellow devotees of logic and the scientific method. Be humane, secular humanists.
8.
It has also not escaped my attention that, as the thoughtful reader will have discerned, “There’s trouble in paradise.” My little utopian society contains inherent contradictions, primarily in the tensions that would inevitably arise between the public good and the private. More specifically, in the realm of freedom. Life nowadays is certainly needlessly stressful and lacking in any sense of communal spirit, or appreciation of “the family of man”. Thus the Gatherings, the emphasis on constant cultural performances, etc.
But this is precisely why planned communities or socie
ties never work, no matter how imaginative and benevolent the founders, or how well-thought-out the enterprise is. At some point—and it is usually fairly quickly—the individual desire for self-expression rebelliously sprouts up like a glorious weed, in blithe disregard for the orderly ranks of the collective’s orchard. And it is precisely a society’s most creative elements, the very people who come up with the cultural canon the rest of us set feverishly to learning, who have the least tolerance for group- or centrally-ordained projects. Composers rarely make the best ensemble players.
And so I am afraid it wouldn’t be very long before my misty vision of a cultural Shangri La, pacifically floating on a sea of collaborative self-actualization, would founder on the sharp, treacherous shoals of good ‘ole human nature. But all is not lost! You see, that’s the advantage of writing in the fantasy and science fiction genre: the author can at any time erect a magic bulwark against pesky reality. In this case, the mass-hallucination-inducing dragons are just the ticket to guarantee a friction-free community.
9.
Let me try to tie a few of these themes together.
a.People need to believe in something.
b.That “something” ideally has all of these characteristics: positive, achievable, compelling, fairly specific. A goal like “peace on earth” strikes one as neither specific nor immediately achievable, thus its current status as a semi-joke. Any religion, even a minor cult that is run out of someone’s garage with only a handful of believers, can do a far better job presenting its belief structure.
c.Science does a bang-up job describing as well as explaining the world we exist in. Someone, I have unfortunately forgotten who, once characterized science as the first intellectual system in history that was not centered around humans. Thus its explanatory power: it is not limited by our concerns or even our presence. We posit the existence of black holes, and build whole cosmological theories around their existence, although no human has ever seen one, and perhaps ever will. (Er, technically speaking it’s impossible to see them because of the whole so-massive-they-don’t-even-let-light-escape thing.) And of course science’s endlessly clever servant, technology, has made modern civilization possible. Science works.
d.However, the answers science gives are almost always provisional, and rarely comforting. “Where did everything come from?” An infinitesimal, cataclysmic explosion billions of years ago that jumpstarted time and space. “What was before that?” Don’t bother asking. You’ll get the cosmologists’ clever answer: “Time started AFTER the Big Bang so your question makes no sense, hehehehe!” “How did we get here?” Sheer dumb luck. Billions of years of brutal, churning evolutionary roulette, with the odd climate catastrophe and species-obliterating asteroid serendipitously in our ancestors’ corner. One less ice age, a smidgen more resilience in this or that dinosaur species, and we wouldn’t be here. “Why are we here?” You might as well ask why there are garden slugs. Science cannot even process questions like that. It irritably shakes its head at them like a horse trying to get rid of a fly. After snorting scornfully, Science personified will peer at you over the top of (its?) bifocals, and in a thoroughly nasty tone, sneer, “I hope you realize that there’s nothing special about our species at all. We’re not at the top of some evolutionary tree, nor are we the pinnacle of creation. Nature wasn’t ‘heading’ toward us; nature doesn’t ‘head’ toward anything, ever. Our ancestors, depilated primates with a sneaky knack for survival, were just in the right place at the right time. And, if we are so great, why do humans go insane all the time, or develop heart disease, and cancer, and, and…crow’s feet? Anyway, parrots and turtles live longer than we do, and the cockroach has been around for 350 million years, and humans for only 200,000. Your God has a funny way of treating the ‘crown of creation’!” “What is our fate?” Hoo, boy. Are you ready? In the best-case scenario, we eke out a few more million years of precarious existence before we mutate into something else or, MUCH more likely, die out like the 99.9% of other species that have ever existed. That figure is not hyperbole, by the way; it’s the actual scientific estimate. In the worst case scenario, there will still be humans in a few hundred years, but they will be vastly reduced in numbers, clinging to the surface of a environmentally-depleted Earth like cockroaches on a bit of flotsam from The Titanic, dreams of future glory drowned in an intergenerational genocidal eco-cataclysm. And all indications are that we are much closer to that end of the probability scale. Sir Martin Rees, Great Britain’s Astronomer Royal, published a book in 2003 with the charming title, Our Last Hour. I wish I could say he was an ignorant crank; I would sleep better at night. Even if, by some Star Trek stretch of the imagination we manage to make it through the social and ecological bottlenecks of the next 100 to 200 years, and then through some even more unlikely chain of events humans could adapt to the rigors of outer space, master interstellar travel, and spread our kind throughout the galaxy…then what? Humanity would remain—human, no matter how outlandish the sky color, or how many moons were in that sky. That means interminable quarrelling, Machiavellian maneuvering, jealousy—the whole usual Pandora’s Box of human foolishness. “Hell is other people,” as Sartre wrote. Ad astra per aspera: “A rough road leads to the stars.” If my Latin were better I would change that phrase to something like, “You really want to take these savages into outer space?!” If our distant descendants really could achieve some transcendent level of tolerance, self-control, communal spirit, and universal enlightenment…well, could one still regard them as humans? By the way, if we hang out in our solar system long enough we can look forward to the Sun running out of fuel and, like an emotionally exhausted middle-aged man going through his second childhood, bloating out to the orbit of Venus and cooking Earth to cinders. And beyond that, the ultimate thermodynamic downer: the heat death of the universe. Just saying.
e.You can see that science does have answers, and deep ones too, but they are rarely final and even more rarely comforting. Now, let’s compare organized religion’s account of humanity’s place in the cosmos. An all-powerful Supreme Being created you, along with everything else in this universe. This Creator loves you, cares about you, and has a wonderful fate planned for you, as long as you follow a few simple rules: 1) believe in Him, privately, in your heart, and publicly, by praying, joining a congregation and professing the truth of your faith’s holy book, the Bible or Koran; 2) follow the specific set of rules your faith prescribes, things like praying 5 times a day, fasting during certain times, etc.; 3) respect the same general code of ethics that nonbelievers ascribe to: no killing, stealing, lying, or being nasty to your fellow humans. That’s about it, except for some very infrequent special requests such as agreeing to participate in a holy war, expunging infidels from the face of the Earth, giving the Church some of your money, and so on. As long as you follow these commandments, you have it made in the shade. Eternal peace and contentment, surrounded by all your loved ones, (well, the ones that are dead) angels, not to mention infinitely closer access to the Creator himself. Or Herself. You know what I mean. The fate of the world, why evil exists, why can’t you tickle yourself…all that is somebody else’s problem. Believe, do no evil, and let the program work for you!
f.I ask you, which is the more appealing story. If organized religion and the scientific worldview were clubs in high school, religion would be the football team, the über –cool, beating heart of student life, while science would be—well, the science club. A few geeks and the dutiful children of Asian Tiger Moms, already working on their Westinghouse Science Talent Search projects the first week of school.
10. It is a bit of a puzzle, actually, one that I suspect drives many seculars batty. Why is religion still so damned popular?
11.
If you have something very important to say about the real world, try putting it into a work of fiction. For, as all children know, the truest stories are the made-up ones.