Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
I went to a Humanists of BU meeting today and the topic for discussion was “Does everyone worship?” based on DFW’s Kenyon commencement address, and the discussion was okay, though not the most excellent intellectual discourse, but I got thinking a lot about this great great speech.
About how everything we do, even the grand and noble virtues we praise timelessly, are all kind of wired into our society or culture or DNA or collective unconscious or whatever. And how living life without critically examining these principles (or in the more extreme examples, totally tearing everything apart and starting moral and epistemological principles from scratch) is kind of submission, servitude, to these rulers of your mind.
It’s not about not blindly accepting truths or being academic or the importance of philosophy or the dumbness of religion or negating every value and meaning. I think at the end of the day the most important thing is simply to be conscious, aware, awakened. Do whatever you want with your life, but realize what you’re doing as best you can.
Or something.
