Sherry Chandler

Why I Am Not …whatever

I’ve always had a distaste for Christianity as it is practiced. One reason has to do with the Medieval trappings of it — the business of Lord and servant, of abasement before a master. I know there are those among my readers who will see this as shallow, as a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but there it is. I’ve always thought the conventional notion of humility has much of Uriah Heep in it, and I’ve always identified more with the Shelleyan or perhaps the Camusian hero: one who acts in defiance of the gods and then takes the punishment.

Another reason is that I’ve always found the conventional notion of heaven less than appealing. I figure I’d get bored pretty quickly singing praises, though I love to sing and always thought music the best part of church. The older I get, though, the more I am moved by the Blues and the less by the gospel.

But I think my discomfort with the notion of heaven is more deep-seated than that, so I give you, as a sort of corollary to Atwood on Utopia, this explanation of the problem of heaven in James Wood’s review of Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006):

Actually, the more complete confounder of the Free Will Defense is the concept of heaven (less important to Judaism than to Christianity and Islam). In heaven, it seems, all tears will be wiped away and we will be free of pain and suffering. We will also be free of freedom — necessarily so, because if freedom were to exist in heaven, we would merely replicate our lives on earth and start doing terrible things to each other again. Heaven, as an intellectual category as much as an “actual place,” depends on the idea that the highest form of happiness — to be face to face with our Maker, and so on — is a state without freedom, or with severely curtailed freedom. But if this is the ideal state, the state that our Creator longs to have us in, then why was heaven not instituted on earth?

Since heaven was not created on earth, we must conclude that our lives here are more or less painful experiments, and that the world is a training ground for heaven.

Yet it is a rigged experiment, since the experiment already knows its own answer. Not just because God, being omniscient, must know what will become of each of us (the Catholic church tied itself up in knots over this issue, and eventually had to repudiate its own doctrine of “double predestination”), but also because a real experiment would put the existence of heaven itself in doubt.

A rigged experiment simply puts our going to heaven in doubt.

Yet if heaven must exist, if there is no doubt that heaven exists, then we know that we are being trained here on earth to exercise a free will that will not be needed in heaven, a free will the exercise of which causes immense pain to many people, but a pain that will be miraculously eased in heaven. This is nothing less than a definition of torture.

Sam Harris’s Letter is one of several defenses of atheism that have been published lately, and ultimately, Wood does not find them satisfying. His position is one that I would describe more as agnostic than atheist. He begins his essay this way:

I have not believed in God since I was fifteen, and now, at forty, I suspect that I am too late to change. But the velocity of that flight from belief has not been constant: there have been hesitations, interruptions, acute nostalgias.

I would describe my own experience in much the same way. And I would not call myself an atheist, though I am in sympathy with the atheist position that neither the club of hell nor the carrot of heaven is needed for humans to act morally. And I am, like them, very tired of the bullying from the Christian right.

I find much that is attractive in the Buddhist notion than humans can reach transcendence without God, can in some ways become God. Even Christians, after all, believe that we all partake of the Holy Spirit. The Gnostics also believed that humans could become God, believed that this was the accomplishment of Jesus Christ. And I find that notion somehow more compelling than the notion that Jesus was somehow God-made-flesh, in part because I can’t help feeling a little bit like he was just slumming.

But, in the end, I find some of the Gnostic writings just too strange. And I find Buddhism too cold. I suppose it would be just too cute to say that poetry is my religion, though I can quote Richard Taylor as saying poetry “is as close to scripture” as he can come. But I am, like Molly Peacock, way too engaged in my human life to forsake it for anything less than poetry. I’ll leave you with her words:

Why I Am Not A Buddhist

I love desire, the state of want and thought
of how to get; building a kingdom in a soul
requires desire. I love the things I’ve sought—
you in your beltless bathrobe, tongues of cash that loll
from my billforld—and love what I want: clothes,
houses, redemption…

— Molly Peacock, from Cornucopia (Norton, 2002)

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Rexroth on the Mandarins

What’s missing from this picture?

Catullus 85

The Christian Paradox

Cat in Window with Essayist

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