Christian Acquaints Atheist

Chris:

I'm afraid I forgot to ask a very important question. Perhaps I could guess, but what do you know as your message? What animates your sense of mission? Although I am something of a pushy proselytizer myself, I do not aspire to this role - I aspire to humility and empathy, any amount of which would make my life easier. Perhaps one can preach and be humble too? I believe that the authentic self cannot know anything for anyone else, hence must be humble, but it is then that I am most effective in communicating and most valued for what I might say. So I might speak-to and be authentic, but preaching and authenticity feel like alternative states for me. Hence, I aspire to unlearn preachy-ness, pedantry. How do you put these together?

I do not identify with many of the characteristics associated with atheists. I think there is usually a view of them as hyper-rationalistic without any humanity. Many atheists are simply anti-theists or just rebelling without really understanding just how optional the "God" hypothesis is, actually remaining in conversation with God the way a child continues to fight with estranged parents even after leaving home. Many atheists really did arrive at their atheism via rationality. My atheism is a truly mystical form - I did not arrive at it using logic, I got there by experiencing, in my whole being, a universe that does not need a creator or a director. I observed the universe, invested my faith in the beauty of the knowledge of science, and found a universe that made sense and invited me to create meaning. I did not find in it a purpose beyond manifestly being, and I did not find in the universe any universal moral truths. I found only the freedom to choose. So if I want to really stretch the definition of God, as many philosophers and theologians do, as being "the cosmos", it would be a God devoid of many of the elements that people who profess a belief in God need to have in their definition: Human emotions, human-like creative process, a human need for connection and reassurance, a human sense of morals, a human desire to control and cause. I am a true atheist. God, in any of the usual definitions, does not exist for me. There is nothing that any of the usual definitions of God offers that I want.

One dissonance for me, that causes me to be an atheist, is that having a belief system has an inherently corrupting effect, because once a person fails a belief system, they become divided and cannot manage their flaws of character. Only those people whose faith returns to something inside, is directed toward some sort of inner guidance system, can actually keep their beliefs in consonance with their behavior. But once a person accepts the literal do's and don'ts of prescriptive religion, the division of the self into good and bad is inevitable, and once divided, conscience is lost. I like about atheism that I cannot avoid responsibility for my choices, and my conscience is undivided from the choices I make.

So many "believers" condemn atheists for being amoral, without a guidance system. I have met one atheist I would characterize this way. But I do not find, if we observe the fundamentalist type of religionist, that having a morality is really sufficient. Sufficient is to have a conscience, which is not assigned by religiosity. I am an atheist with a conscience.

So yes, I would hope that there is something of value about my atheism.

When I needed to put my email account name on my landlady's internet account, she had to check with her minister to see if it was OK!

Stephen Alrich Marshall

Moving Target

With the dawning realization that global climate change is real and happening, and is attributable largely to the human activity of burning fossil fuels for energy, the immediate reaction of many folks is to ask "How can we reduce the amount of CO2 produced to meet our energy needs?" The goal, in shorthand, is "sustainable energy production and use.". The vision is a world not much different from the one we know, managed sustainably.

But this awakening to the need for energy sustainability coincides with several other, intimately connected changes of equal or greater consequence.

One of these, the end of cheap oil, is helping to persuade many to invest in sustainable energy technologies just for the financial benefits. But as the supply of cheap oil declines, the once abundant and convenient fuel that drove the massive suburbanization of America and life styles filled with stuff, will become too expensive to support this level of consumption. We will experience dramatic dislocation due the expiration of cheap oil.

Not surprisingly, cheap oil has abetted a massive increase in human populations, along side of rising expectations, commensurate with that they see in our television shows. Remove cheap oil and …?

Meanwhile, the heat retaining effect of CO2 is not felt instantaneously. Even if all emissions were to end today, the Earth would continue to warm under the CO2 blanket we now have. With or without additional CO2, the oceans will rise just from their warming and expanding, dislocating the masses of humanity that live in or close to that one foot. But also, weather will be less predictable and climates will change, causing more dislocation of peoples due to hostile weather, and unreliable water supplies and food production. And a warmer Earth means that ice is melting, removing reservoirs of water that have sustained humans for tens of thousands of years, and further filling oceans. And most of that ice, far from human populations, is above sea level. Already scientists are reporting that water percolating down to the bottom of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is lubricating their motions, and portions of these sheets could slide into the ocean, further raising sea levels by meters, up to eight. New reports predict that new climates will be created in this new world, while old climates will simply vanish. Were these things to happen, a truly global flood would hit the reset button on human evolution.

In this context, what does "sustainable" mean? Fill in the blank in "Sustainable _____ use": Water, soils, fuel, forest, metals, food, air, space. Fill in the blank in "Sustainable ______" with any human activity or value: communities, economic development, families, political systems, social systems. Once we have admitted that our world is changing, that we face not gradually increasing pressures of population, food supply, fresh water, disease, competition for natural resources, with each other, and competition for habitat, with the natural world, but actually sudden and dramatic crises and conflicts, the question "What is sustainable?" has a new meaning. Energy production and use that does not produce CO2 emissions is only the first hurdle, and just preparation for the struggles to come. Still, we must adapt to conditions of a changing food supply, changing sea levels, insecure energy supplies, polluted water, epidemic disease in a time of massive population upheavals, governments willing to secure their borders with guns and blood, and the existential burden that each of us will need to bear, of a humanity bent on self-annihilation. To render the environment of the Earth hospitable to human life, or just to life, the task facing humanity is far larger than just limiting CO2 production. We must make humanity sustainable.

Many people will have no difficulty grasping this argument. The further argument may be less obvious.

"Sustainability" is a moving target. Sustainability, in so far as it can be achieved, won't manifest as a static structure. Given the hyper-kinetic energies of humanity, the ever pressing, pushing, inventing, building, destroying, rearranging, ambitions of human beings, even that system that might prove sustainable, if perpetuated, will be cast aside before being proved, before it has had a chance to work out its flaws, before it has repeated its productive cycles enough times to demonstrate that it might actually be sustainable. No, our search for sustainability will not be productive if we search for a particular formulation of, a closed ecology of, technology, political structures, or social arrangements.

Sustainability will not even manifest as a dynamic structure, and our search cannot be productive, if in our restlessness we search for a thing, for control of that system that is sustainable.

Our search for sustainability will be productive when what we seek is meaning. Sustainability dwells in the inventors themselves, in the commitment to taking less and giving more, to making life and relationships the source of meaning, not the possession of things. Sustainability dwells in the spirit of the design, in the integration of systems of supply, consumption and recycling. Sustainability dwells in the designers, the inventors, the livers, who ask, will this system self-strengthen, or self-destroy? Sustainability resides enduringly in the people, in their freedom and chaos, seeking for that something that feels right and durable and meaningful. Embedded in the human soul is the knowledge that what is sustainable, what self-reinforces, has meaning. Profound meaning.

That is how we know what is sustainable: It has meaning.