another atheism reflection

We had another atheism service at church last week. This was a followup of the one we did a year and a half ago. Three of us, Tom, Sarah, and I, shared our thoughts on the subject. Someone commented on my previous reflection, so I thought I'd share this one, the newer version showing where I am now. I'd be interested to hear your comments, as long as they aren't mean. :)

Today I’m going to talk first about how I learned some of life’s lessons without the benefit of religion. Then how I am enjoying much more learning life’s lessons with the help of religion. And finally, how this leads me to want to spread the word and bring other heathens into our fold. Maybe our selling point can be: join us and you can still be heathens!

I have been an atheist for 28 years now. For the first 25 years, I was a typical atheist. I concluded there was no God; and I associated religion with a belief in God, authoritarianism and lack of free thought. I lumped “spirituality” in there too, whatever that was. When I threw off the cloak of religion, I threw out the good with the bad, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Fortunately, before I concluded I was an atheist I did study both eastern and American Indian philosophy which left an imprint on me. I developed an attitude of living in the moment and not the future. I didn’t choose my career based on what would give me a good job or money in the future, but on what I enjoyed doing. I figured I could always get a real job when this road ended. So that was a good start. But that’s about all the spiritual tools I had at my disposal for the next 25 years since I didn’t believe in spirituality. I focused on my career, because I was taught to work hard, and because I felt ready to be a contributor after spending the first 20 years of my life learning. However, the subject I was contributing to, which is astronomy, is pretty esoteric. While I think it’s important for society to support the arts and sciences, I also felt that something was missing in pursuing only this. Not only that, but the culture in academia, well, if you need spiritual sustenance and don’t know it, you probably won’t accidentally stumble upon it in academia. However, everyone’s experiences will vary. Especially during my postdoctoral years, I was in a more competitive than cooperative environment and was encouraged to take on what I consider to be more negative values, like selfishness, and being concerned about status. But I was as much to blame as others for playing along. The other difficulty for me with academia was that you couldn’t choose where you wanted to live. You are expected to move wherever the job takes you. I also developed a rather negative attitude at this time, and thought I was superior to most of those dopes who are tying up faculty jobs all over the world. I’m sorry to admit this.

Well, without knowing I was on a spiritual journey, I chucked it all and moved to Madison, in search of…I wasn’t sure what, but a more ‘full’ life. Plus my girlfriend lived in Madison! I could have forced her to follow me to some faculty job somewhere but I felt in the big picture, my career was not as important as her roots in Wisconsin. I went on a 4 year career journey that was very good for maturing me and giving me grounding and a sense of perspective. At the end of that, I found myself back in astronomy with enough funding for 5 years. I said to myself, okay, I’m going to enjoy the next five years and do astronomy the way I want to do it. I don’t care if that is the end of my career after that—at least I I will have 5 good years. For me, that meant sharing instead of advertising. I spent 3 years developing a computer code to interpret data from an upcoming infrared telescope. Then I published a few papers on it, and made all the codes publicly available for anyone to use. My elders said, ‘that will be the end of your career!’ Of course, it wasn’t. I got more people asking me to collaborate, more “citations” on my publications, and more invitations to give lectures than ever before because people were trying to learn how to use the codes I developed. I also got outstanding students who wanted to work with me. I also met lots of people who shared my attitudes about cooperation, and I realized there are lots of nice people in academia after all.

So in my journey without spirituality and community support, I managed to learn some perspective, some grounding, and that if you want to share and cooperate, go right ahead! I also started developing a more positive attitude about life. But I was still missing something: friends. My friends were scattered around the world, having followed their jobs of course.

I stumbled into James Reeb a few years ago after quizzing an atheist friend of mine about why he went to church. He was very enthusiastic about this small church called James Reeb. I didn’t expect to like it but I figured you never know until you try. Boy I was wrong. This turned out to be a perfect fit for me. The U-U religious principles and practice express everything I believe in. And James Reeb is a very special place to me.

So how is an atheist different from a believer in a supernatural being? To tell the truth, I think it matters much more how you live your life than what you believe. I feel I have more in common with some Mormons than I do with a lot of atheists. An Episcopalian friend of mine asked me, “If you are an atheist and you go to church, what do you worship?” I thought about it and replied “I worship ideas, the best qualities of humankind, and what we can accomplish if we put our minds to it. I worship the earth and plants and animals and the universe.” Another friend of mine says she believes in God because she wants something to thank for all the wonderful things we experience in life. I love that sentiment. All of us, whether we are looking for something to thank or worship, for a way to serve our community and to be in community with others in good times and bad, for spiritual sustenance, and/or to seek out the truths, we can find this through religion, at least the U-U religion. That is what makes us similar, this desire to journey with others, not our beliefs.

So now that I found religion, I’ve pursued my spiritual journey with relish. What has that consisted of? Well, here are five examples of things I’ve done: 1) read a bunch of books; 2) joined a chalice circle; 3) done community service in the church; 4) gone to services; 5) became a worship associate. I’ll describe them briefly.

1) I read some books about the U-U principles and practices. There are several great, short books on these in our library, which will someday re-exist. I learned how to win friends and influence people from Dale Carnegie. That is a misleading title for a wonderful little book written in 1936 about how to live your life. He says that sharing, smiling, and treating people with kindness and respect will make you successful; and by successful, he doesn’t mean rich, he means happy. I learned how to spread social viruses from Malcom Gladwell’s book “The Tipping Point,” because it’s a good book and I want to spread the virus of love and happiness. I learned about mindfulness from thich nath han. I learned about “radical self acceptance” from a buddist teacher named tara brach.

2) my chalice circle. This is a group of 7 people who get together and share what is going on in our lives to each other. Over the last couple of years we’ve been interested in what a spiritual journey is and how to do it. We’ve developed our own spiritual practices and shared them with each other. The chalice circle is one of the most important activities of my life. I love my chalice circle friends and feel bonded to them.

3) Community service is to me, by far, the most important aspect of a spiritual journey. I just think you can’t receive anything without giving. I don’t know why it works this way, but it is part of our nature to want to give and it produces a very fulfilling result. We are naturally cooperative people, despite what we’ve been taught (to justify capitalism in my opinion). And it is so easy to get involved in Community Service here at James Reeb. Perhaps this is the time to advertise next Saturday’s work day? 9a-1p.

4) Sunday services. I know that I will always get something out of a service: sometimes it’s the moment of silence that I enjoy the most—which is not to say the rest of the service is lacking, just that I sometimes really enjoy the moment of silence. Between the opening words, hymns, joys and concerns, pastoral thought, reflection, and socializing afterwards, I have no trouble finding joy in one or more aspects of service.

5) worship associate. The best thing about being worship associate, for me, is reading poetry, which I do when looking for opening or closing words. I’m a complete poetry novice, and I don’t understand most of them. But every once in a while I get one, and it’s fun. I also enjoy the reading and writing I do in preparation for a service. I’m the first to admit that the results don’t usually reflect the preparation that went into it, haha. One thing I did for this service was I listened to a bunch of sermons from the FUS website while I was driving to and from Toledo last week. There was a section from one sermon by Michael Schuler that I found very relevant to this discussion: Robert Solomon, a philosophy professor, said that spirituality is about the grand thoughts and passions in life. By passions, he means: love, reverence, and trust. The enemies to spirituality are not skepticism, doubt or disbelief; rather, they are envy, resentment, vengefulness, self-righteousness, and exclusivity; these are the negative passions, which are prevalent and even commended in our culture. Schuler says, “Therefore, to be spiritual in this day and age is to be radically counter-cultural.” I love this. Maybe that explains why I have this strange desire to become a hippie.

So where am I going with this spiritual religious atheistic journey and reflection? Well, I think my spiritual journey has two parts or goals. The first part is internal, learning to live a good life, and doing what makes sense to me, not what society tells me to do. Over the 25 years when I was a spiritually challenged atheist, I learned some important lessons through hard experience. I think I could have learned them much more easily if I’d been a member of a place like James Reeb. So that leads me to my second goal: I would like to reach out to other spiritually challenged people out there, and spread the social virus of love and happiness. I would like James Reeb to grow, not for the sake of growing and getting more pledges, but because I think so many people in this neighborhood and throughout Madison, need James Reeb and don’t know it. I think people are tired of being depressed and cynical, and using consumerism as a substitute for happiness. So I suggest that we be radically counter-cultural, like Jesus was, and share our love, reverence and trust with everyone we meet.