Dr. Freeman

Does it strike anyone else a little odd that the violence and bloodshed perpetuated in the name of God in this post-911 age makes the New Atheism of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins look like a moral imperative for the 21st century?[1]

For centuries we have been told that without God we are nothing more than egotistical animals fighting it out for our own survival, and now – with the civilized world under increasing threat from religious fundamentalist of all flavors – the traditional equation of religion and the good life has been turned upside-down… In the present day it seems that our human dignity and self-respect needs to be asserted in no uncertain terms against those religious adherents who claim to be hard-wired to the will of God!

But the New Atheist’s rational critique of religion is nothing new - philosophers from Hume to Kant to Nietzsche have been saying this for about 500 years now… But what is new is that the New Atheists are not merely atheists in the traditional sense of the word (i.e. deny belief in the existence of God) – they are “anti-theists “– or as Christopher Hitchens argues in God is Not Great, his latest NY Times best-seller - the notion of God as a Cosmic Designer or a Celestial Dictator that is aware of our every thought and deed is a wicked, poisonous and evil idea - and  we cought to celebrate the fact that it is not true…

From an Integralist’s perspective the conventional wisdom is that Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris (and others) are just throwing out the baby with the bathwater – they want to demolish the archaic, magic and mythic versions of God but they will not allow the rational, post-modern and integral versions of God any legitimacy… But if we take a closer look this is not so!

Christopher Hitchens on Transcendence

A contrarian philosopher with a razor-sharp wit and a blatant disregard for all things sacred, Christopher Hitchens has made a career out of exploding liberal illusions (see his formidable critiques of pop culture icons Bill Clinton, Princess Diana and Mother Theresa). However, while he argues that the bad things innate to our species are strengthened and sanctified by religion, Hitchens does have an unexpected open-ness to what he calls “the order of the transcendent” or the mystical dimensions of human experience.

With a kind of `luminous” faith in humankind, Hitchens at least starts out by affirming the Socratic oath of ultimate Not-Knowing that launched the Western philosophical tradition, where his definition of an educated person is that you have some idea how ignorant you are.

But moreover, he also declares his appreciation for mystical dimension of human experience (i.e. higher states of consciousness) – what he calls “the numinous” or “the transcendent” – and gives examples of where this sublime dimension can be encountered in everyday life: the beauties of science, the extraordinary marvels of nature, the wonder and consolations of philosophy, the infinite splendors of literature and poetry – all of which have mystical and devotional aspects that Hitchens is quite prepared to honor and include in his otherwise dark and ironic view of the world…

In all of these pursuits, Hitchens claims that there may be found a sense of awe and reverence that does not depend at all on any of our man made religions – and he verges on an Integral (or second-tier) perspective here in so far as his openness to the transcendent dimension of life is also one that is often bored and sickened by what passes for spirituality in the New Age - ghost stories, UFO tales, tarot charts and the barely veiled narcissism of The Secret, etc…

Richard Dawkin’s Mysticism

Probably the world’s most steadfast and notorious atheist, Richard Dawkins was up until recently the professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford University.

From this colorful writings on Darwinian evolution as a deeper, richer more astonishing account of human origins than what is offered by the Genesis myth, to his most recent interview-debate with Francis Collins[2] (See Time Magazine “God vs. Science” - Sunday, Nov. 05, 2006), Dawkins is also keenly aware of the perpetually surprising and astonishing nature of the world revealed by evolutionary biology and modern science.

As Dawkins states to Collins on the belief in God “But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea”, refutable – but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect… I don’t see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it’s going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.”

Right there we have a statement that any Integralist can whole heartedly affirm, - God is bigger than our minds can contain - and furthermore, according to Dawkins: “There is mystery in the universe, beguiling mystery… There is mystery but not magic, strangeness beyond the wildest imagining, but no spells or witchery, no arbitrary miracles.”

So Dawkins is no denier of the Mystery – he does accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine. “To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say the answer is God–it’s that that seems to me to close off the discussion.”

In his Un-weaving the Rainbow, the positive message throughout is Dawkins’ impulses to awe, reverence – the same impulse to and wonder that leads other scientists, philosopher and poets to mysticism… He claims that the scientist has the same wonder, the same sense of the profound, as the mystic, but with an additional impulse: let’s find out what we can about it… And in close parallel with the core driver of an Integral approach he concludes the final two paragraphs of this book by saying that human beings are the only animal with a sense of purpose in life, and that our true purpose should be to construct a comprehensive model of how the universe works, i.e. a Kosmology

And with that ultimate view of things, Dawkins would do well to read Ken Wilber’s latest work on post-metaphysical spirituality — a Kosmic Giga-glossary that spans the entire spectrum of humanities experience of the Divine – from volcano gods of primitive tribes to the post-conventional claims of the world’s most realized mystics such as Meister Eckhart or Sri Aurobindo…

Sam Harris on Buddhist philosophy

Another one of the most outspoken atheists in the world today, Sam Harris is also a practitioner of Buddhist meditation, as a tried and tested path to see clearly into the true nature of consciousness.

For Harris Buddhism is more a science than a religion, for a person can embrace the Buddha’s teaching, and even become a genuine Buddhist contemplative without believing anything on insufficient evidence. The same cannot be said of the teachings for faith-based religion, for which there is very little empirically tested evidence. In many respects, then, Buddhism is very much like science. One starts with the hypothesis that using attention in the prescribed way (meditation), and engaging in or avoiding certain behaviors (ethics), will bear the promised result (wisdom and psychological well-being). This spirit of empiricism animates Buddhism to a unique degree. For this reason, the methodology of Buddhism, if shorn of its religious trappings, could be one of our greatest resources as we struggle to further develop humanities spiritual self-understanding. As Sam Harris writes in The End of Faith,

“Attentive readers will have noticed that I have been very hard on religions of faith–Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even Hinduism–and have not said much that is derogatory of Buddhism. This is not an accident. While Buddhism has also been a source of ignorance and occasional violence, it is not a religion of faith, or a religion at all, in the Western sense… the esoteric teachings of Buddhism offer the most complete methodology we have for discovering the intrinsic freedom of consciousness, unencumbered by any dogma… it would be intellectually dishonest not to acknowledge its preeminence as a system of spiritual instructions.”

So where the conventional critique of the New Atheist movement is that it’s critique of religious myth and superstition throws out the baby with the bath water by denying higher, deeper forms of spirituality (based on direct experience not beliefs), it is actually the case that all three of the major authors driving this cultural phenomenon we call the New Atheism are mystics or one sort or another, and probably just lack a language that they can use to express their sheer astonishment that anything exists at all…

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[2] Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute since 1993, Collins headed a multinational 2,400-scientist team that co-mapped the 3 billion biochemical letters of our genetic blueprint. In The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press), he laid out the arguments for belief in God. Collins believes that studying the natural world is an opportunity to observe the majesty, the elegance, the intricacy of God’s creation. If your mind is open about whether God might exist, Collins argues that you can point to aspects of the universe that are consistent with that conclusion.

Are you sick of pretending to have your shit together? Is the task of feigning sanity driving you mad?? Is the honest confession that you may be totally deceived in your highest aspirations precisely the thing that makes your passion for life authentic?

No, not me either… for just as the real journey only begins when we do not see exactly where we are going, and just as existential resolve is never stronger than in the morning after the night when it was never weaker, in a time of peace the war like man sets about surrendering everything to a passion for Not-Knowing that undermines all his claims to premature self-actualization with a free gift of Love that costs him precisely everything…

And just as God created the world “ex nihilo” (out of Nothing), when this very same God wants to bring forth a great man he must also firstly reduce him to nothing… and thereby show him that in order to live fully and authentically, you must engage in a life and death struggle to subvert, transgress, deconstruct the thin veil of righteousness that centers everything around itself, become vulnerable to the strange truths that threaten one’s self-boundaries and honestly face up to the Impossible/Real in which the absolute Truth is logical nonsense…

So with a tremendous affirmation of the Mystery that derails or unsettles the standard use of language on the basis of its established meanings, leaving it’s reference (developmental signified) Empty, I will infuriate politically correct thought police and hereby maintain the radical un-decidability between the sacred and the obscene, the existential ambiguity between love and murder, and the phenomenological confusion between God and Terror – for all of these are radically Not-Two!

Both the actual occasion of ones profound spiritual awakening and the most overwhelming forms of violence (e.g. the Tsunami that occurred on the day after Christmas 2004 destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and the world-wide shock and awe stemming from the terror attacks of 911) - both of these events – the wonder of radical awakening and the horror of meaningless suffering – events that are said to be at opposite ends of the spectrum of human experience, are intrinsically unforeseeable, utterly unimaginable and totally unbelievable. That is, both Love and Death come to us from out of nowhere and leave us spell-bound and speechless, both come to us as an absolute surprise, and often as something monstrous, a horrendous apparition that explodes all our standards for harmony, order and ethical conduct… Yes friends, both Terrorism (Death) and God (Love) go past all conventional standards and ethical value-judgments in a dreadful awakening to the groundless abyss, and so the question remains: how much truth can you handle without the sugar coated defense against the shattering experience of chaotic vulnerability??

As all those Christians who read their Bible and all radical Muslims know, just like Abraham going up the mountain to sacrifice Issac, when we obey the unconditional claim of God on our lives we must give up any human justification, any rational grounds, and any merely human calculation. For as soon as you know for sure where you’re going and seek make everything turn on a clear-cut distinction between the Divine and the Demonic, the saint and the heretic, the messiah and the false prophet, as soon as you think you have a handle on this distinction, then that is the foreclosure of faith, the end of hope and an obstacle to love!

When you are sure you have the Real one, you can be sure that you’re lost in the wilderness, and so maybe it is better that the Secret remains secret after all… for who can we trust to administer it, interpret it, protect it?? In other words, if the Secret were given, the cure would quickly turn to poison…

And so in the cloud of Un-Knowing, where we give up any calculation, any claim to know the Name of that One, if God is found anywhere it is in the Nameless - i.e. the crucified, the abandoned, the destitute and those despised by those well bred, well-fed upholders of the established structures of goodness, truth and beauty…

Yes indeed, there is time-honored trajectory in the Western tradition from Isaiah to Paul to Luther to Kierkegaard to Derrida: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise… I will deconstruct the civilized madness of the ones who are supposed to know… for the foolishness of God always trumps the wisdom of the world.

The Christ-event is therefore a radical New Beginning, accompanied by the violent, traumatic, and contingent intrusion of Another Dimension that disrupts and destabilizes the predominant symbolic code. And since this event is not mediated by the domain of terrestrial finitude with its propensity for corruption and the abuse of power, this intrusion of the traumatic Real - this crucified God - renders obsolete the conventional distinction between the believers and the infidels, the saved and the lost, the theists and atheists with an amoral reversal that cuts to the heart of Jesus’ own radical teachings on the Kingdom of God.

For in the in-breaking of the already/not-yet Kingdom where everything is turned inside-out and up-side down, who can be left out?? And who can say for sure that they are in?? For where the absolute religious experience is made possible by “an asymmetrical obedience to an absurd order” (Derrida), an space that is otherwise than the structures of power that service the privileged few, everything that goes by the name of religion, philosophy, truth and goodness would actually get in the way – lest we forget the dangerous memory of Jesus of Nazareth - for the Truth will strike us as deeply Absurd, and come to us as something that we did Not see coming… so all we can do is stay open to an unpredictable earthquake, and hope and pray for something, we know not what… as our true purpose in life will come over us in an event that at first looks like a sheer accident, a complete failure or an unmitigated disaster…

So, when all the boundaries between God and Satan collapse then we have no way of telling a terrorist from a freedom fighter, a democratically elected leader from a religious fundamentalist, a nation of civilized people from a collection of fearful and desperate barbarians, an illegal bombing from a legal war… and when we shatter the categories that hold together our fragile grasp on (so-called) reality then we are in a fruitful space, an empty/pregnant/void in which all values can be created anew. So rather than radically dissociating Good and Evil, Us and Them, Resurrection and Death, I suggest that we are to assume our mortality and suffering in its most radical form. To be sure, the incomprehensibility of Terror IS indistinguishable from our divine stupor before the un-knowable Other-ness of God… and neither of these limit-experiences can be domesticated or made ones own… for they both elude all our programs of mastery, slip through the grasp of all our schemes, and resist reduction to all history, revelation, and all truth…

And so maybe behind it all there is Nothing behind it all, there is nothing to prop up our established beliefs and practices – maybe that is the condition of Truth. It is there, from a time out of mind… It already has me, before I have IT, before I Am – it is there – a matter of my undoing, like the heat death of the Universe… I am made destitute by It… I am debilitated by It… It holds me there ‘without remission’… I cannot say what it is - Being and God and Truth have been reduced to ashes and consumed by this nameless, formless Impossibility… this indeterminate desert-like emptiness that antedates all determinate forms and structures… it is Nothing that I own but Something to which I must own up… I call out and it doesn’t answer – there’s no body there… Its bottomless depth eludes my grasp, haunting me, unknown, ungraspable, an Abyss that threatens to swallow up everything that keeps me here… like a black hole that follows the death of a star absorbing the light of all the smaller bodies around it. Yet, it is there. This is what has us…and maybe all our little truths, and virtues and institutions and programs for self-improvement will be reduced to ashes without a trace… for all we know the stars twinkle in the void of endless space and the little planet teeming with life will one day sink back into the sun… Will anyone ever know that we were here?