#50: Beyond the Limits of Atheism
After replacing fundamentalist Christianity with fundamentalist atheism, I am finally embracing the genuinely liberated thoughts and experiences which I once suppressed in their favor
“You’re being very… chill about this,” I say cautiously. “Considering you’re a passionate atheist and everything, you’re accepting the notion of a spirit demon very… gracefully.”
….
“The thing about being an atheist is I don’t have a problem with belief. I just don’t like religion.”
“So witchcraft is fine, but God is not.”
“Sort of, yeah,” Fiona says. “I can accept that you accidentally summoned a demon to take away your best friend, but I can’t accept the concept of original sin.”(Caroline O’Donoghue, All Our Hidden Gifts)
I cannot say I regret being an extremist atheist to the same extent that I regret being a right-wing Christian. I doubt I can even say I regret my fundamentalist atheism at all, since it was a necessary stage toward freeing my mind from the infantilizing effects which Evangelical Christianity has upon the brain. But even if my atheism functioned as an effective antidote to the fears of Hell and sex which youthful clerics are still striving to inject into the minds of children, and even if my godlessness helped me purge myself the most perverted aspects of Christian morality, the stridency of radical atheism still restricted my experiences in new ways which I am now overcoming.
All atheism signifies is the outright denial that God or gods exist. In that sense, I think Fiona’s definition might be a little too unfocused, as she credits her atheism to a distaste for religion and does not mention God at all. Even so, as I was reading All Our Hidden Gifts, this particular passage about atheism and witchcraft halted my progress. She gets it, I thought. This is what I’ve been telling people for a few years now, only to receive some of the most puzzled and even concerned expressions from the many materialists within my social circle. Yes, I am an atheist, I try to explain, but I try to find it easy to believe in spirits, both good and evil ones. I like the idea of believing in witchcraft, the tarot, astrology, and the summoning of demons. I suppose I lack the respect most atheists seem to have for the scientific method as the final word on truth. Then again, this isn’t really about truth. It’s about exploring other ideas for the sake of their aesthetic appeal, although I want to believe so strongly that I end up believing. When I recently proposed to a similarly-minded friend, also an atheist, that we attempt to summon a dark entity, both of us were a little too afraid to go through with any ritual. As Maeve, the protagonist of All Our Hidden Gifts, suggests about one of her friends, we simply have too much respect for the occult to turn it into a game.
When the demon-summoning idea came to me, we had just been finishing up some Christmas shopping at Barnes & Noble. It was an experience which renewed my fantasies of committing the ultimate act of defiance against God by communing with his most wicked enemies. Atheism was not a conclusion I came to after years of careful study; it was an emotional release, perhaps as easily inclined toward paganism as toward science. I almost wished God were real, just so I could pursue my adolescent delusions of leading a rebellion against him like Lord Asriel in His Dark Materials. If I’m being honest, it was the appeal of Milton’s Lucifer in Paradise Lost, not the cool rationality of science, that first sent me down the road toward atheism. Sadly, my friends assure me I would fall to me knees before the power of the Lord, and I dread my seemingly inevitable submission every time I hear “O Holy Night.” Regardless of God’s reality, however, I am drawn ever closer to the topics forbidden by his ministers. The Barnes & Noble we visited held a massive section flooded with books, some of them huge and expensive, on ridiculed and dangerous fields ranging from spellcraft to divination to communication with spirits. I can’t recall seeing anything quite like it sixteen years ago in high school. Socially, it is the bottom pit of a slippery slope stretching up to Harry Potter and Buffy. “As Christianity recedes,” I declared triumphantly while we wandered through the occult section, just as if I were some megalomaniacal know-it-all teenager, “paganism is spreading.”
Having grown up Evangelical, I know the terror which these dark arts inspire among many Christians. They believe wholeheartedly in witchcraft but see it as a tool of the Devil; I grew up believing in witchcraft, which my elders warned me to avoid. So at Barnes & Noble, I was greatly pleased to imagine the old distressed Christian parents, worried that their children might end up tampering with demons, and I found myself hoping that these parents would fail to pass down their cherished religion to their own kids. That their children would be seduced by the flood of pagan books on the market, liberating them from Jesus. Yet I didn’t want or expect these children to become atheists. At least in America, I cannot imagine a scientific materialism replacing Christianity. Humans seem innately to sense and perceive something more to reality than the physical world around us. Perhaps thanks to the advent of the Enlightenment, Science, and Communism, many of us now insist upon the supremacy of reason, and we suppress our “unreasonable” perceptions of the world, laughing at the idea that people 3,000 years ago could have been right about magic. Lately, however, at least based on the obvious prevalence of astrology and the growing demand for spellcraft books, I cling to the hope that both the Enlightenment and Christianity will struggle to overcome the intensifying appeal of paganism. We humans want something more than materialism. As organized religion weakens, a currently disorganized paganism slowly replaces it, satisfying the desire. I explore paganism because I like the idea of it, and whether it is true is beside the point.
As an Evangelical, I liked to boast that my mind was closed not only to all ideas but also to all interests which might jeopardize my salvation and send me to Hell. Once I left that behind, I went through a brief phase of radical open-mindedness, yet the most doctrinal atheism soon rebuilt the crumbling walls around my brain. It was not enough to reject the existence of the Christian god, which I still find easy to achieve. Dogmatically convinced that all supernatural experience was nothing more than a trick played upon us by the brain, I also rejected all forms of both religion and spirituality. Growing up, we take in stories from our culture about ghosts, demons, and witches. Then our minds, already primed by evolution to seek patterns and find danger in the environment, project these ideas onto the reality around us, especially in the dark. Books I read by “evolutionary psychologists,” pseudo-scientists whose conclusions are not based on experiments but rather on assumption-heavy theories about prehistoric hunter-gatherers, declared that all these perceptions are a matter of the brain misfiring its survival mechanisms. It was natural that, to avoid being killed by predators, ancient hunter-gatherers would have interpreted the slightest movement in the bushes as a lion or a tiger. Wandering around at night in the modern world, our brains are still instinctively looking out for danger, and our consciousness will use ideas from popular media about demons, ghosts, and aliens to interpret mysterious movements in the trees or shadows on the wall. Much of this is backed up by the experiments of certain neuroscientists, and the truth of it seems obvious to a modern man. But when the evolutionary psychologists or neuroscientists proceed to claim that all supernatural experience is invalid because they are able to explain much of it away, they easily discount the complex experiences of countless millions, and that is when they exhibit too much confidence for my taste. But years ago, I ate it all up. For me, radical atheism was simply a new way of closing my mind to all ideas and experiences which contradicted my strictly materialist worldview. I was unwilling to consider paganism because I had thoroughly replaced the intellectual suffocation of fundamentalist Christianity with the uncompromising materialism of New Atheism.
Lately, I have been wondering why I would have wanted to trade one fundamentalism for another. It was much worse, of course, as a Christian. I felt a need to scan virtually everything according to whether it would cultivate or undermine my faith in Christ, whether it would inspire me toward righteousness or incite me into sin. That meant being weary of all kinds of books, television shows, video games, musical artists, politicians, news outlets, philosophies, and social activities. To be free from those restrictions - to intentionally think, do, and say things that I knew the Christian god deemed sinful - was one of the most intoxicating aspects of becoming an atheist. But even if my mind was always much more open to new concepts in general as an atheist than it ever had been as a Christian, my newfound zealotry against religion allowed certain anti-theistic doctrines to limit me from the truly free pursuit of ideas, which for me means pursuing ideas not only for the sake of understanding objective reality but also for the sake of simply deepening my engagement with anything that interests me. When confronted with witchy beliefs in astrology, the tarot, demons, spirits, or sorcery, I dismissed them all without any investigation or consideration, telling myself that all of that stuff was bullshit and mocking it with my friends. All the while, I wanted to know more about these mysterious fields, but I hesitated.
Outright disbelief in the occult, which came like nothing to my friends, came to me only with great difficulty. I was drawn to paganism, and I have always gravitated into conversations with those who practice it. Even as a radical atheist, I was attracted toward people who believed in the occult, and I would often ask them questions respectfully in the hopes of learning more about their perspective. I was careful. As a defense mechanism to keep me from ever having to contradict the pseudo-religious principles of my radical atheism, I always told the pagans I was a deeply convinced materialist. I said I wished I could believe in spirituality but couldn’t. Yet I was suppressing the embarrassing fact that some part of me already did believe. Eventually, I gave in and began reading more occult books myself.
I remember one atheist friend of mine ranting to me about how he couldn’t believe how stupid people were for believing in astrology. “How can they think,” he said, “that the position of the stars affects their personality?” He scoffed, looking to me with confidence about my agreement. Instead, I told him that isn’t really an accurate description of astrology. The universe, I explained, is a whole, and everything is connected. It’s a simple principle, I told him: “as above, so below.” There is a correlation, but not necessarily a cause, and that is why the position of the stars matters in terms of events on earth. Apparently unable to believe that I was seriously defending astrology, he pressed on, but in doing so, he only revealed that he had neither read nor considered the ideas he was so viciously attacking. He told me none it made any logical sense, and I told him it’s not about logic, it’s about poetry. “Magic is about poetic thinking,” I explained, quoting a book I had recently read on the subject. I said it in a tone that showcased my seriousness about the topic, but he looked at me like I was delusional. He incuriously repeated a few misconceptions about astrology. Intimidated by his confidence, I reassured him I didn’t really believe. I had just read a book about it. His face seemed to ask me why I would read a whole book about astrology, to which I would have uneasily responded that it was only one chapter in a book about the Dark Arts. But I let him have the last word. This, I knew, would be like arguing with my grandma about Jesus. His whole expression reminded me of how one super Christian relative reacted when she saw me get a Buddhist book for Christmas. As if protecting herself from a devilish presence, she recoiled a bit in her seat. Comparing her in my mind to my scoffing companion, I felt like I had merely traded Christian pastors for the high priests of atheism as the new guardians of what I might respectably read or consider. My issue, I mean, wasn’t that he disagreed with astrology. It was that he constantly and vociferously attacked it without knowing anything about it, almost as if he were a Christian youth minister warning children about the lies they were going to learn in biology class about the origins of species.
This socially enforced closed-mindedness, which was one thing I hated most about Evangelical Christianity, had followed me into my liberation. I would be an idiot, I thought, if I sat around reading witchy books. Better to read books by snickering neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists debunking it all. Just as I had once divided books into those which edified my faith in Christ and those which undermined it, I was now dividing them into those approved by Reason and those which Reason opposed. As a radical atheist, I was a different kind of prisoner, one who was still fundamentally confined even if he had been granted many more privileges. To be truly free, I needed to be able to remove the guardrails of reason when electing what to read.
This isn’t about whether the occult is “true” or not. This is about whether I am willing to allow myself to explore it without putting up ideological walls that prevent me from fully absorbing the concepts and world views which interest me. This is about pursuing interesting ideas simply because they appeal to me, without concern about how my reading might change my social group’s view of me. It’s about letting myself draw conclusions based not only on the scientific method but also based on my emotions and senses. The pagan take on reality is one which inspires me, which feels right to me in some emotional or aesthetic way, even if I recognize the scientific absurdity of it. The only reason why I ever totally rejected it was because my version of atheism was a kind of semi-organized religion, one which urged me to suppress certain feelings and urges when engaging with the world. Like all organized religion, it kept me within certain Thought Boundaries defined by the scientifically possible, the scientifically proven, and left me with a sense of shame about my interest in those realms of knowledge and experience which lay beyond those sanctioned by science. Now I have freed myself from that shame, and I have ceased to care about the atheists’ concerned expressions when I tell them I have been reading about magic. It feels more natural and liberating to consider new concepts from an emotional and sensory perspective instead of merely from a logical and scientific one.
I have lost the faith I once had in the fundamental superiority of reason over feeling. Seeing no need to always check my emotions with logic, I allow my thinking to be influenced by both. Why? Because I like it. For a truly open mind, free thinking is a form of entertainment and a pathway to new experiences. I explore the occult because I like it aesthetically and because I want some of it to be true, and I am shamelessly content with an open-minded agnosticism toward witchcraft, astrology, tarot cards, and demonology. I dimly perceive paganism’s reality, and even if that is partly due to the influence of the culture around me, the same can be said for those who cling to a strict scientific materialism. But I delight in the atheists’ snickers only about a tenth as much as I relish the misery of the Christian elders who have to watch their descendants throw away the family’s most sacred and holy traditions. No doubt my attraction to magic is fueled by a desire to rebel against my old Christianity by embracing the practices which would deeply disturb my pious ancestors and relatives. I am eager to dishonor the religious beliefs which they have passed down over the generations, and atheism doesn’t cut it. So I know the anti-Christian bias behind my attraction to witchcraft, but knowing the bias is no reason not to indulge. I know how absurd it all seems scientifically, but not even that is enough to stop me. When I look at the world and think about life, I just can’t see why I would suppress all my senses and emotions, or restrict my experiences, in favor of adhering to a scientific materialism where there are neither souls nor spirits. I suppose I would still call myself an atheist, because I don’t believe in God. Still, I prefer to embrace the magical.
Photo my own