Approval is sweet. Anyone who wants it should avoid writing about God. No one will completely agree with you. (In a multicultural world, that’s good.) You won’t get the satisfaction of preaching to the choir—in most churches, the choir stalls are growing empty and cold. In a single week in 2013, the New York Times ran two op-ed pieces that denied the possibility of spiritual aspirations. One was titled “The Blessings of Atheism”; the other, “The Myth of Universal Love.” They appeared right after Christmas. Perhaps that was the point. Being of good cheer left a bitter taste. God is a divider, not a uniter.
I’ve tried to present God without demanding an either/or choice. If the Bhagavad Gita is right to say, “All roads lead to me,” meaning God, the road of nonbelief can’t be judged against. I don’t go to church or temple myself. The writer of “The Blessings of Atheism” decries people like me, who think of themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” With undisguised disdain, she continues with this phrase, “as translated from the psychobabble, can mean just about anything—that the speaker is an atheist who fears social disapproval or a fence-sitter who wants the theoretical benefits of faith … without the obligations of actually practicing a religion.”
Or it can mean something genuine. Atheism makes a mistake when it equates religious practice with spirituality. The deeper I got into this book, the clearer it became that almost anything one can say about God implies some kind of mistake. No one has a monopoly on the truth. That doesn’t mean that truth doesn’t exist. In the same way, no matter how badly religions act, it doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist. So many heated emotions swirl around God that I took the tack of meeting atheists on their own ground. Dawkins and company own a label maker that stamps their camp with approving words like rational, scientific, sane, courageous, and logical. When the label maker is pointed at anyone who believes in God, it spits out demeaning words—irrational, superstitious, conformist, illogical, and crazy.
Belief deserves its share of the good labels, so I apply sanity, reason, and logic to support the reality of God. Faith can’t save itself. Stranded in a secular world, it will fall on deaf ears unless we talk in secular terms. In an ideal world, both sides would obey the injunction in the Old Testament to “be still and know that I am God.” In our silence, we could take time to read Rumi, Kabir, and Tagore. God is in the thrill of inspired verse, as in this couplet:
Listen, my heart, to the whispering of the world.
That is how it makes love to you.
That’s Tagore, and he doesn’t have to mention God for you to feel that he is spiritual.
I grew tired of the road
when it took me here and there.
I married it in love
when it took me Everywhere.
Tagore again, just as spiritual, just as free of religiosity. A book that speaks entirely from the heart would be the next best thing to silence. When you have written a sentence that you’re sure will convince a skeptic, you set yourself up for a fall. I’ve wept over verses that make another person snicker or look bored.
Which leaves the arena of ideas, where reason, sanity, and logic must be applied. With that in mind, I’ll end by offering a batch of key ideas, those that must be addressed by both sides. Each idea points to a bigger discussion in the book. On their own, they are like telegrams, a few phrases to get the message across. I’ve divided the batch into three sections that correspond to the major subjects the text has covered: militant atheism, faith, and God. In my new enthusiasm for social media, I’ve tweeted these ideas, so I can attest that they generate heat, one way or another. What they can do here is better, I think. You have an opportunity to see where your beliefs have wound up.
Even your most cherished beliefs may have shifted—or not. We are often the worst judges of what is going on in our inner world. Ideas mostly play on the surface of the mind. It’s better to rely on a poetic image about God. He is like a faint perfume detected when you are drowsing off at night. You hardly know what delicious scent awakens you, but for a while it’s hard to go back to sleep again.
1. His atheism attacks a Sunday school version of God as if there were no other. It lumps any kind of religious belief in with the excesses of extreme fanatics.
2. His atheism rests on the belief that the universe has no intelligent source. Yet a random universe is the least likely explanation for how intelligent life came about.
3. His atheism equates reality with the material world, as perceived by the five senses. This fails to account for the quantum revolution, which opened up reality far beyond the visible world.
4. His atheism traces all events back to inflexible laws of nature but cannot explain why the laws of nature exist or where they came from.
5. His atheism uses evolution as an argument against an intelligent source for life, even though survival of the fittest cannot explain the creation of life.
6. His atheism positions itself as rational but cannot explain the source of rationality. How does random brain activity produce order and logic?
7. His atheism claims that biology is the basis of consciousness without offering a theory for how molecules learned to think.
8. His atheism views the brain in terms of rigid cause-and-effect. All thought and behavior is deterministic. He gives no explanation for free will, creativity, or insight.
9. His atheism denies the existence of the self, considering it an illusion created by the brain. Yet neuroscience has never found a location for “I” anywhere in the brain.
10. His atheism cannot explain how the illusory self arrives at self-knowledge.
1. Faith is not blind belief but a knowing that comes from experience.
2. Faith is the willingness to step into the unknown.
3. Faith expresses wonder before the mystery of existence.
4. Faith comes from inner silence and what it reveals.
5. Faith brings trust in the inner world of insight, intuition, and imagination.
6. Faith brings a person closer to the source of creation.
7. Faith introduces the true self, which is beyond ego.
8. Faith connects the world “in here” with the world “out there.”
9. Faith abolishes the divide between natural and supernatural.
10. Faith in your deepest self is faith in God.
1. God is the intelligence that conceives, governs, constructs, and becomes the universe.
2. God is not a mythical person—he is Being itself.
3. God is uncreated. The universe cannot reveal God, since everything that exists is created.
4. God exists as a field of all possibilities.
5. God is pure consciousness, the source of all thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
6. God transcends all opposites, including good and evil, which arise in the field of duality.
7. God is One but diversifies into the many—he makes possible the observer, the observed, and the process of observation.
8. God is pure bliss, the source of every human joy.
9. God is the self of the universe.
10. There is only God. The universe is God made manifest.