I was going to read The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, but when I started reading it, I realized it wasn't speaking to me at all. I don't need a book to convince me not to believe in a God, because I'm already pretty much there. I've talked about not being a Christian before, and I think I've even mentioned my phonebooth in the sky fantasty (complete with a literary elephant), but I never can remember how much I've actually talked about when it comes to God. My history is peppered with God, because of who my friends are, and after high school, I stopped thinking about it so intensively because it was a freedom not to have to fight for the right to be atheist or agnostic (or to go to hell, as I was told repeatedly). I don't remember the specifics of any of those conversations between very passionate, afraid Christians and me, but I suspect that there was a lot of handwringing on their part, and a lot of questions forced to make me confront how empty my life was without God.
I don't remember when it happened, but I once told my HSBF that I believed in people the way she believed in God, and I know she was trying to be gentle (but came off as triumphant) when she said, "And what happens when people let you down?" Because no shit, they tend to do that. People'll let you down at every little corner of your life. I'm not that naive. I never said that I believed people were good or that people were faithful or that you could put your faith in people. I just said that I believed in people. That in balance, at the end of the day, people would generally give you something to believe in. I guess I still think that, on good days.
I have a lot of beliefs, in fact, though most of them are trivial and inconsequential. (Although I'm not quite certain that any belief is more than those two things, to be honest. Isn't a belief something that can't be proven? As such, can they ever be things that mean much in our lives? We may cling to them, but do they get us through the day-to-day?) I don't know that I can list those beliefs, like a to-do list or a grocery list. A lot of what I believe seems to be the kind of crap that introspective college students (or high schoolers, I guess) come up with when they want to sound profound, stuff about the essential meaning/nature of life. Half the time, I'm not sure if I really do believe what I'm espousing, or if I'm only espousing it because at that moment, it sounds very good. I used to thrive on philosophical discussions like that, but now I find them vaguely troubling and useless. Who cares whether or not there's a God? Who cares about souls and afterlife and things that are so abstract as to be absolutely meaningless?
I'm discovering that I don't. I don't care about those things. I mostly care about going about my day in a way that feels true to myself. I mostly care about loving where I am, and who I am, and who I am with. That feels more meaninful to me than worrying about what the ultimate purpose of all this is, because when you're worried about that shit, you're missing the actual stuff happening to you, with you, around you. I suppose that very essentially, I'm not a very philosophical person (In fact, I hated philosophy with a passion. Took one class, as a freshwoman, and hated it. It's probably misplaced hatred, at least towards the academic discipline, that happened because when I tacitly admitted I was an atheist in my phil. class, the class jumped on me, incredulous that anyone could not believe in God. I think I was pretty much done with it after that. Stupid frosh, at a Catholic school, saying she doesn't believe in God. My fault, but still.) and really don't care about those questions, when it comes down to it.
It's actually rather surprising, as I always thought I did care about that stuff. So yeah, thanks Richard Dawkins, for making me realize that I don't care. That I don't want to waste anymore time contemplating things that ultimately lead me nowhere.
It makes me sad that you had a bad experience in a Philosophy class at college. I'm sort of surprised that you got jumped on for saying that you're athiest, and that the professor didn't step in and use that to facilitate discussion, or at least steer the class back on-topic. I was a philo major mostly because I really loved the professors in that department and those classes were always so intellectually stimulating for me. However, since most of our mutual friends (some of whom share your beliefs) were in my classes, and I know we didn't have philosophy together, I guess it isn't to surprising for the women in your class to react that way. Most of the fun people were in my class, I guess.
Then again, my FY philo class was a tandem and the English professor made no bones about her belief that the Bible was a (somewhat ridiculous) work of fiction. It's harder to attack a student for atheism when the professor has more or less said that anyone who ISN'T atheist might be a little slow.
Posted by: Rita | February 20, 2007 at 09:15 AM