This is my statement. In it, you will read about why I produce this blog, why I believe what I believe about atheistic optimism, and why I think people need to hear it. It starts with my own story and travels through religion and psychology down (up?) at last to Inspiration.
Generally, my life story is not so exceptional – family deaths, grief, youthful desolation, and financial ruin are very old and common tales. The exceptional aspect of my childhood was that, raised by pessimists who abandoned the religions of their youth (my father was “foot-washing Methodist” and my mother, Southern Baptist), I grew up with absolutely no concept of religion, god, or faith. "Atheist" is the default position for my soul switch, and that will never change, because it feels natural to me. Atheism was not a logical decision based on previous experiences, it is simply how I was born and raised. Unfortunately, my father was a veteran who turned to alcohol as a salve for his war-burdened soul, and my mother was bipolar (which to my childish perception registered as “crazy as a loon”), and their illnesses warped their perceptions of the world in very negative ways. They jettisoned the concept of God and replaced it with bitterness, anger, and shame. I grew up loved and cherished and protected from the harsh world, but it was still a depressing and sad house to be in. I was unhappy.
And so I remained. I believed that life conspired to keep me unhappy, and even after my parents died and I lost everything, including our home, I kept myself tied to the habits of my parents and their house (even though I did not have that, either). I was at a point of re-inventing myself and breaking free of the misery that had filled my days, but somehow, I simply could not do it. Healthy and free of addictions, I remained miserable, if only because I did not know how to feel anything else. I cast myself as victim: I was unhappy and unfulfilled because bad things happened to me.
Which was true, in a concrete way. Bad things happen to everyone, though; it is not particularly special to be subject to terrible events, even if they are rightly traumatic.
So, I just kept on being miserable. My operating principle was, “as soon as {fill in the blank} happens, things will get better and I will be happy.” I missed years of things getting better because I kept waiting to be happy. Funny thing was that over time, I stopped being utterly miserable and unhappy. I reached a stage of not being unhappy, but not being happy either. This did not match my version of events and I was confused.
As my husband knows and regrets, I am a worrier. I not only worry about events, I also worry at problems, which is different. I think about them. I research them and wander the library stacks looking for information about them and surf online for hours reading about them. In this case, wary of starting on an anti-depressant (I knew what-from depression, thanks to Mother, and I did not think I was clinically depressed), I finally turned to religion, or more specifically, religious texts for answers. Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Baha’i, Sikh, Buddhist, you name it: I read it and read about it. I called it my search for God and I prayed a lot and went to many services and talked to many, many good people but no god ever entered my soul. What did enter my soul, though, was a creeping awareness of repetition. All these texts were saying the same thing, in different ways, and not just “worship God.” They were all instruction books on how to change the way you think: stop being greedy, and be grateful; stop being sad, and be joyful; stop being angry, and start giving love freely; stop feeling victimized and start feeling compassion. Over and over and over again I read these directives. Suddenly they leapt out at me everywhere: Oprah Magazine, New Age books, music, billboards. It was weird.
Finally, two events coalesced into the beginnings of understanding. First, I discovered Ernest Holmes’ Science of Mind writings. These writings are outstandingly optimistic and based on the simple idea that what you purposefully think and practice will change what you believe. This fit beautifully with my more scientific bent, especially in relation to physical improvement: if you work out hard and exercise intelligently and eat smart, you can change your body. The old maxim was in play: garbage in, garbage out. If I believe the mind is the manifestation of an organic organ (the brain), then the same logic must apply. I was not enamored of Holmes’ insistence on “God” but the rest of it was what I needed to hear. Since Science of Mind writings exist outside of traditional religion, they were within my comfort zone and I took to reading them daily.
The second event was discovering the writings of Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. He very clearly stated, in his call to arms for a new branch of psychology called Optimism Psychology, that being happy is more than the act of not being unhappy. I light went on in my brain (or neurons collided, whatever) and I knew I finally, finally, had the missing key. Not only could you change the way you think about what happens to you, as all the religious texts and Science of Mind tracts insisted, but you can actually learn how to be happy. Seligman calls it Learned Optimism, the art of seeing the glass half full and filling up instead of the miserable reverse.
Both of these events put all these religious texts into perspective: it was not about God, but about brain. These texts more often than not spend a great deal of time lecturing and showing how to think differently: to change your perspective about what befalls you, and to act positively in both joyous and terrible circumstances. They were precursors to the theory of Learned Optimism. At last, I had a valid basis for what my instincts were telling me about religion, and I realized I could grasp on to an atheism that was rich with meaning and spirituality.
My journey continued, of course; through Hitchens’ God is NOT Great (a wonderful book) and Ursulsa Goodenough’s The Sacred Depths of Nature, into Kurzweil’s transhumanism and various texts on naturalism, atheism, and faith. Through it all I continued to see that atheism in all its forms was, to be honest, unformed. Atheists identify themselves by what they are not. This inherently negative position is accurate and unavoidable, but not very inspiring.
I believe the broad spectrum of elements, light waves, sound waves, chemical processes and biological life forms are better representations of “Life” than rigid, superstitious, religious doctrines. Nonetheless, as the old saw goes, “Science explains how, not why.” The reason religion in some form or another has persisted throughout the development of human culture is because it answers a basic, perhaps even elemental need in us. We want to believe in something greater than the small life and small world we live in; simply put, we want our lives to matter, somehow, and we want to be happy about it. In the past, religion gave us the tools to do that; imperfectly and often corrupted, but they are there nonetheless.
Even in the most primitive worlds, we knew there was more to the world around us than what we could see, hear, or visit. Tribes laid out imaginary boundaries beyond which members could not travel, but the act of putting those restrictions in place only proves that the knowledge of “more” existed. This knowledge was frightening to people in ancient times, and is no less frightening now. Given that science tends to continually and exponentially prove just how insignificant we are, how can one find any spiritual peace within it?
This question was thoroughly answered by Goodenough in The Sacred Depths of Nature. As she explained, to be an atheist must not mean removal of all that is inspirational, moving, and fulfilling in life. Taking God out of faith does not make the world a purposeless mess. But, as a spiritual naturalist – an atheist, after all – where can I go for inspiration? Where, oh where, is atheistic Optimism?
Here.
Atheistic Optimism is not meant to be a branch of philosophy (but if Joseph Pitisci reads this, I’m sure it will turn into one). I use both atheist and traditional religious (or even non-traditional religious) texts and writings in my own pursuit of Optimism from all sources, which for me is neither here nor there. As atheists, we can take the beauty of anyone’s writings without having to buy into their theology. We have escaped the trap of superstition and ideology, and we are reaching out and up for inspiration, optimism, and hope. That is what I’m all about.
