Athiesm

Time to go deep, here. Garfield Ridge has a nice post on athiesm, which is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, in between raising pinatas and watching my Lego Wookiee rip the arms off of little Lego stormtroopers.

Part of it is that my son will enter elementary school in a few years and I wonder if it will be a good idea to send him at some point to Catholic school, which I attended from grades 4-12. I'm an athiest now but consider my Catholic education -- which at no point featured ruler-wielding penguins -- to be the most valuable instruction I've ever received outside of the "Gears of War" manual.

In middle school and high school, an hour of religion class was part of everyone's daily curriculum. Of course it was intended to strengthen belief in God by further steeping young minds in the history and culture of the Church. But the courses also went into great historical detail of the Middle East and Europe, and parsing passages of the Bible later enhanced my appreciation of the great body of literature that taps its rich imagery.

That religious education also laid the foundation for my later interest in China. One high school course I took was "Non-Christian Religions", in which we studied Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism. The latter three marked the start of my fascination with things Chinese (as opposed to broadly Asian, which I believe began at about age 10 when I fell in love with a Japanese waitress at a Beni Hana in Edmonton).

Ironically, it was also that class that planted seeds of my eventual abandonment of faith. When you're talking religious belief systems built around faith in a supernatural power, what makes one superior over another? I'm talking here in the metaphysical sense -- what makes the concept of a single, all-powerful God more believable than a pantheon of gods, or an impersonal cosmic force, or spirits that inhabit all animals?

I've also been following developments with one of my favorite sci-fi authors, John C. Wright, who wrote the brilliant libertarian space opera "The Golden Age". For years he was a rabid athiest and even wrote a fantasy series designed to show the foolishness of Christianity.

Then he had a series of religious experiences and converted to Christianity. Before you roll your eyes, his account of the coversion is fascinating and he writes of it with the clarity and precision of Jesuit scholar rather than the bombast of a televangelist. Given the brilliance of his fiction and his obvious intelligence and erudition, I find it impossible to just dismiss out of hand. This isn't Bill O'Reilly or Michael Moore.

What I find most interesting is that Wright talks about having constructed, pre-conversion, what he considered to be bulletproof arguments in defense of athiesm. What changed his mind wasn't any sort of flaw in the logical construction of his arguments, but rather the intensely personal experience of having had visions and feeling that he was filled with the Holy Spirit, which he somehow makes sound better than the feeling I get from imagining Cameron Diaz eating Kate Winslet under the table.

I suspect that is what Cal Thomas, the Washington Post columnist who sparked GR's post, is talking about when he says athiests cannot be convinced by information alone. Many faithful believe because they have had a personal religious experience, not because they have weighed the logical merits of both sides of the debate. And that's why a lot of arguments between believers and non-believers are just pointless -- a religious awakening is just not replicable in a lab for skeptics to experience for themselves.